Revisiting Depth Layers from Occlusions

Adarsh Kowdle, Andrew C. Gallagher, Tsuhan Chen

Abstract: In this work, we consider images of a scene with a moving object captured by a static camera. As the object (human or otherwise) moves about the scene, it reveals pairwise depth-ordering or occlusion cues. The goal of this work is to use these sparse occlusion cues along with monocular depth occlusion cues to densely segment the scene into depth layers. We cast the problem of depth-layer segmentation as a discrete labeling problem on a spatio-temporal Markov Random Field (MRF) that uses the motion occlusion cues along with monocular cues and a smooth motion prior for the moving object. We quantitatively show that depth ordering produced by the proposed combination of the depth cues from object motion and monocular occlusion cues are superior to using either feature independently, and using a naive combination of the features.