Geometry-based estimation of occlusions from video frame pairs

The knowledge of occlusions and newly-exposed areas, a natural consequence of changing object juxtaposition in a 3D scene, can be effectively used to improve video coding efficiency, video rate conversion quality and view interpolation fidelity. Although various occlusion estimation methods have been proposed to date, most of them are not robust or are computationally complex. In this paper, we study two simple, well-known occlusion estimation methods, one based on a photometric mismatch between two frames of an image sequence, while the other based on a geometric mismatch. We demonstrate their weaknesses and propose a new geometric method that exhibits good robustness to noise in the data while maintaining low computational complexity.