Novel algorithms for object extraction using multiple camera inputs

This paper presents novel algorithms exploiting multiple camera inputs and segmentation techniques, which can be applied to image fusion, disparity detection and object extraction. Differently focused images, stereo pairs and both of them are used for fusion, disparity detection and object extraction, respectively. Firstly, image fusion is done by segmentation of each image and determination of focused regions per segment. An efficient decision criterion is developed taking the method of auto-focus into consideration. Secondly, disparity detection is executed by recursively applying segmentation and disparity detection per segment. A new clustering criterion is proposed in order to achieve good segmentation and high compression ratio of disparity maps simultaneously. Finally, object extraction is carried out by utilizing both the fusion result and the disparity map. Experiments are carried out, and they show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms