Stereo Vision and Scene Segmentation

Scene segmentation is the well-known task of identifying the image regions corresponding to the different scene elements or segments Sk , k = 1, 2..., N belonging to a predefined set S par‐ titioning the scene in N subsets, each one corresponding to a scene object or to a region of interest. Beside being an important problem by itself, segmentation is also employed as a preliminary step in many other computer vision tasks, e.g. object recognition or stereo vi‐ sion. A closely related problem, very relevant for the television and movie industries, is vid‐ eo-matting which consists in separating the background from the foreground.