Copyright © 2006 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Special Section on Machine Vision Applications -- Papers -- Stereo and Multiple View Analysis |
Removal of Adherent Waterdrops from Images Acquired with a Stereo Camera System*
The authors are with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Shizuoka University, Hamamatsu-shi, 432–8561 Japan. E-mail: yamashita{at}ieee.org
In this paper, we propose a new method that can remove view-disturbing noises from stereo images. One of the thorny problems in outdoor surveillance by a camera is that adherent noises such as waterdrops on the protecting glass surface lens disturb the view from the camera. Therefore, we propose a method for removing adherent noises from stereo images taken with a stereo camera system. Our method is based on the stereo measurement and utilizes disparities between stereo image pair. Positions of noises in images can be detected by comparing disparities measured from stereo images with the distance between the stereo camera system and the glass surface. True disparities of image regions hidden by noises can be estimated from the property that disparities are generally similar with those around noises. Finally, we can remove noises from images by replacing the above regions with textures of corresponding image regions obtained by the disparity referring. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Key Words: image restoration, stereo images, noise removal, template matching, disparity estimation
Manuscript received November 1, 2005. Manuscript revised January 24, 2006.
* This paper was partly presented at IAPR Conference on Machine Vision Applications (MVA2005)[1] and 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2005) [2].