Apparatus and method for detecting object automatically and estimating depth information of image captured by imaging device having multiple color-filter aperture

A depth information estimation apparatus comprising:

• a color shift vector calculation unit configured to calculate a color shift vector indicating a degree of color channel shift in an edge region extracted from color channels of an input image captured by an imaging device having different color filters installed in a plurality of openings formed in an aperture;
• and
• a depth map estimation unit configured to estimate a sparse depth map for the edge region by using a value of the estimated color shift vector, and interpolate depth information on a remaining region other than the edge region of the input image based on the sparse depth map to estimate a full depth map for the input image.

An automatic object detection method comprising:

• a background generation step of detecting a movement from a current image frame among a plurality of continuous image frames captured by an imaging device having different color filters installed in a plurality of openings formed in an aperture, to generate a background image frame corresponding to the current image frame;
• and
• an object detection step of detecting an object region included in the current image frame based on differentiation between a plurality of color channels of the current image frame and a plurality of color channels of the background image frame.