Learning joint intensity-depth sparse representations

This paper presents a method for learning overcomplete dictionaries composed of two modalities that describe a 3D scene: image intensity and scene depth. We propose a novel Joint Basis Pursuit (JBP) algorithm that finds related sparse features in two modalities using conic programming and integrate it into a two-step dictionary learning algorithm. JBP differs from related convex algorithms because it finds joint sparsity models with different atoms and different coefficient values for intensity and depth. This is crucial for recovering generative models where the same sparse underlying causes (3D features) give rise to different signals (intensity and depth). We give a theoretical bound for the sparse coefficient recovery error obtained by JBP, and show experimentally that JBP is far superior to the state of the art Group Lasso algorithm. When applied to the Middlebury depth-intensity database, our learning algorithm converges to a set of related features, such as pairs of depth and intensity edges or image textures and depth slants. Finally, we show that the learned dictionary and JBP achieve the state of the art depth inpainting performance on time-of-flight 3D data.

Learning sparse representations of depth

This paper introduces a new method for learning and inferring sparse representations of depth (disparity) maps. The proposed algorithm relaxes the usual assumption of the stationary noise model in sparse coding. This enables learning from data corrupted with spatially varying noise or uncertainty, typically obtained by laser range scanners or structured light depth cameras. Sparse representations are learned from the Middlebury database disparity maps and then exploited in a two-layer graphical model for inferring depth from stereo, by including a sparsity prior on the learned features. Since they capture higher-order dependencies in the depth structure, these priors can complement smoothness priors commonly used in depth inference based on Markov Random Field (MRF) models. Inference on the proposed graph is achieved using an alternating iterative optimization technique, where the first layer is solved using an existing MRF-based stereo matching algorithm, then held fixed as the second layer is solved using the proposed non-stationary sparse coding algorithm. This leads to a general method for improving solutions of state of the art MRF-based depth estimation algorithms. Our experimental results first show that depth inference using learned representations leads to state of the art denoising of depth maps obtained from laser range scanners and a time of flight camera. Furthermore, we show that adding sparse priors improves the results of two depth estimation methods: the classical graph cut algorithm by Boykov et al. and the more recent algorithm of Woodford et al.