3D Photos - Summer Palace

In this post, we are gonna try to get the best possible depth map for a stereo pair provided by my good friend Gordon. Size of the images is 1200x917 pixels, so about 1 mega pixels.

Left image (after rectification by ER9b).

Right image (after rectification by ER9b).

ER9b gives us:
min disparity = -82
max disparity = 7

Let's turn to our favorite automatic depth map generator, DMAG5, to get the depth map. Here, we are gonna use a downsampling factor of 2 to speed things up.

Let's start with the following parameters for DMAG5:

radius = 16
alpha = 0.9
truncation (color) = 30
truncation (gradient) = 10
epsilon = 255^2*10^-4
disparity tolerance = 0
radius to smooth occlusions = 9
sigma_space = 9
sigma_color = 25.5
downsampling factor = 2

Left depth map generated by DMAG5.

Left occlusion map generated by DMAG5.

Not a very good depth map! Unfortunately, we have occluded pixels on the right of Gordon and at the top of its head. The occluded pixels on the left are totally expected.

Let's call on DMAG9b to shake things up and improve the depth map.

Parameters we are gonna use in DMAG9b:

sample_rate_spatial = 16
sample_rate_range = 8
lambda = 0.25
hash_table_size = 100000
nbr of iterations (linear solver) = 25
sigma_gm = 1
nbr of iterations (irls) = 32
radius (confidence map) = 12
gamma proximity (confidence map) = 12
gamma color similarity (confidence map) = 12
sigma (confidence map) = 4

Left depth map generated by DMAG9b.

Confidence map generated and used by DMAG9b. Black is low confidence and white is high confidence.

Better but it looks likes it is gonna be a tough one. Let's try something else by reducing the radius used in DMAG5 and post-process again with DMAG9b.

Let's use the following parameters for DMAG5:

radius = 4
alpha = 0.9
truncation (color) = 30
truncation (gradient) = 10
epsilon = 255^2*10^-4
disparity tolerance = 0
radius to smooth occlusions = 9
sigma_space = 9
sigma_color = 25.5
downsampling factor = 2

Left depth map generated by DMAG5.

Left occlusion map.

Clearly, there is a lot more noise but we are hoping the less smoothed and more accurate depths will give better results in DMAG9b.

Parameters we are gonna use in DMAG9b (same as before):

sample_rate_spatial = 16
sample_rate_range = 8
lambda = 0.25
hash_table_size = 100000
nbr of iterations (linear solver) = 25
sigma_gm = 1
nbr of iterations (irls) = 32
radius (confidence map) = 12
gamma proximity (confidence map) = 12
gamma color similarity (confidence map) = 12
sigma (confidence map) = 4

Depth map generated by DMAG9b.

Confidence map used and generated by DMAG9b.

I think it might be possible to improve the depth map further either by tweaking further the parameters used in DMAG5 or by using another automatic depth map generator like DMAG2, DMAG3, DMAG5b, DMAG5c, or DMAG6.