Exploiting Depth Information for Indoor-Outdoor Scene Classification

A rapid diffusion of stereoscopic image acquisition devices is expected in the next years. Among the different potential applications that depth information can enable, in this paper we focus on its exploitation as a novel information source in the task of scene classification, and in particular to discriminate between indoor and outdoor images. This issue has not been addressed so far in the literature, probably because the extraction of depth information from two-dimensional images is a computationally demanding task. However, new-generation stereo cameras will allow a very fast computation of depth maps. We experimentally show that depth information alone provides a discriminant capability between indoor and outdoor images close to state-of-the art methods based on colour, edge and texture information, and that it allows to improve their performance, when it is used as an additional information source.