Clausius Normalized Field-Based Stereo Matching for Uncalibrated Image Sequences

Abstract

We propose a homology between thermodynamic systems and images for the treatment of time-varying imagery. A physical system colder than its surroundings absorbs heat from the surroundings. Furthermore, the absorbed heat increases the entropy of the system, which is closely related to its disorder as given by the definition of Clausius and Boltzmann. Because pixels of an image are viewed as a state of lattice-like molecules in a thermodynamic system, the task of reckoning the entropy variations of pixels is similar to estimating their degrees of disorder. We apply this homology to the uncalibrated stereo matching problem. The absence of calibrations alleviates user efforts to install stereo cameras and enables users to freely modify the composition of the cameras. The proposed method is also robust to differences in brightness, white balancing, and even focusing between stereo image pairs. These peculiarities enable users to estimate the depths of interesting objects in practical applications without much effort in order to set and maintain a stereo vision setup. Users can consequently utilize two webcams as a stereo camera.

Clausius Normalized Field-Based Shape-Independent Motion Segmentation

“…In this paper, to prevent any confusion, most of our mathematical notations are identical in terms of meaning to those in the paper [19]. An ideal system generates p (i, j, t) with an update of its parameters along with some physical rules.…”

“…To use CNF for motion segmentation, we need to define the following three features as mentioned in the paper [19]:…”

“…We adopt a thermodynamical approach, a Clausius normalized field (CNF) [19], to build motion segmentation systems that meet the requirements noted above and to solve the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph. As mentioned in earlier work [19], the essential concept of CNF is derived from the Clausius entropy definition [17] and a thermodynamic system that exchanges heat with its surroundings.…”

“…As mentioned in earlier work [19], the essential concept of CNF is derived from the Clausius entropy definition [17] and a thermodynamic system that exchanges heat with its surroundings. Information about well-known four laws of thermodynamics [30] can help understanding this paper well.…”

High‐Quality Stereo Depth Map Generation Using Infrared Pattern Projection

“…Stereo matching, which is a passive method, finds the correspondence point between more than two images and calculates the 3D depth information using trigonometry [3], [4]. When the texture is low or repeated in a scene to obtain the depth information, the stereo matching has difficulty acquiring the exact depth.…”