so that later the application can be extended to the
3D reconstruction of faces. The minimum and max-
imum disparities of these images are K
min
= 374 and
K
max
= 446, which means that the state-space model
has K = 73 states.
The reconstruction is done by applying the
forward-backward algorithm to an HMM with the
transition probability described above and with the
observation probability given by eq. (7). For the cal-
culation of the likelihood expression, we consider that
the noise variance is σ
2
n
= 0.05, the gain variances
σ
2
α1
= σ
2
α1
= 0.25. We performed the calculations on
the pixels within 31x31 windows. Thus, N = 961.
The reconstruction is also performed using the
NCC as similarity measure. Since this measure is
not a probability density, it possibly should undergo
a rescaling to make it more suitable for a substitute of
the observation probability. After some experimenta-
tion, we found that the following mapping of the NCC
1
2
(1+ NCC)
γ
(18)
is a suitable choice. The best reconstruction was ob-
tained with γ = 6. We applied this expression within a
HMM with the transition probabilitydescribed above.
The windows that were used are also 31x31.
4.3 Results
The reconstructed disparity maps are shown in Fig-
ure 4. A comparison with the ground truth (Figure 3)
shows that the reconstruction based on the new likeli-
hood function is more accurate and more robust than
the one based on the NCC measure. The new likeli-
hood expression is better able to deal with, especially,
the steplike transitions due to occlusion. The NCC-
based result is oversmoothed, and cannot locate this
transitions accurately. Note that the large error on the
right-hand side of the disparity maps are caused by
missing data in the left image.
5 CONCLUSIONS
We have found an expression for a likelihood function
that can cope with unknown textures, uncertain gain
factors and uncertain offsets. In contrast to the classi-
cal approaches this likelihood is not based on some
arbitrary selected heuristics, but on a sound proba-
bilistic model. As such it can be used within a prob-
abilistic framework. The likelihood can be fine-tuned
by setting a limited range of allowable gain factors
rather than just any gain factor.
Using the model we were able to show that cop-
ing with unknown offsets can safely be done by nor-
malizing the means of the data, as done in other ap-
proaches such as the normalized correlation coeffi-
cient. Unknown gain factors and unknown textures
are dealt with in a way that differs a lot from other
approaches. Yet, the computational complexity of
the proposed metric is quite comparable with, for in-
stance, the computational load of the NCC.
We demonstrated stereo reconstruction within the
probabilistic framework by the forward-backward al-
gorithm with a suitably chosen HMM and showed
that it is a resourceful approach. We showed that
the newly proposed likelihood is more suitable for
stereo reconstruction within the probabilistic frame-
work than the NCC. The reconstruction using the
new likelihood deals better with occlusion, while the
NCC tends to oversmooth the area with greater abrupt
change in depth.
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