INTEGRATING VISION MODULES - STEREO, SHADING, GROUPING, AND LINE LABELING

It is generally agreed that individual visual cues are fallible and of ten ambiguous. This has generated a lot of interest in design of integ rated vision systems which are expected to give a reliable performance in practical situations. The design of such systems is challenging si nce each vision module works under a different and possibly conflictin g set of assumptions. We have proposed and implemented a multiresoluti on system which integrates perceptual organization (grouping), segment ation, stereo, shape from shading, and line labeling modules. We demon strate the efficacy of our approach using images of several different realistic scenes. The output of the integrated system is shown to be i nsensitive to the constraints imposed by the individual modules. The n umerical accuracy of the recovered depth is assessed in case of synthe tically generated data. Finally, we have qualitatively evaluated our a pproach by reconstructing geons from the depth data obtained from the integrated system. These results indicate that integrated vision syste ms are likely to produce better reconstruction of the input scene than the individual modules.