A Fast Algorithm for Occlusion Detection and Removal

This paper describes a simple and fast algorithm for removing occlusions that may occur in multiple views of a scene. In contrast to many methods of the literature, no assumption is made on occlusion shapes, colors or motions. Instead, this new method assumes that the background can be re-warped using an homography and that the reflectivity is quasi-Lambertian. After geometric and photometric alignments, three methods are evaluated. A median based method, a novel algorithm based on maximal clique detection and a robust PCA method are compared on real and simulated image sequences. This comparison shows that the new clique-based method provides the best performance in terms of quality and reliability.