The depth part is actually much easer than you might think and we've had techniques for doing some aspects of it since the 80's if not earlier.
One early technique was to take video form a mounted camera moving horizontally on weals looking 90 degrees to the side from the direction of travel (think looking out the side car window).
Now if you take that sequence of video frames and stack them one after the other like a deck of cards to create a 3d volume. Then you look down on that volume, what you will see are lines of color moving diagonally. Top left to bottom right, or the other way depending on your direction of travel.
These are the image features as they trace there way across the video over time. Things that are close move quickly so have a shallow diagonal. Things that are further away move slowly and have a much steeper diagonal.
Thanks for the explanation. I've been working a little bit with a guy doing some computer vision stuff for an industrial system (shingle production line), and I've noticed that a lot of (what seem like) complex problems can be effectively solved with very simple solutions.
Is there any simple literature that covers this domain? Like a book of algorithms for computer vision, or something?
Sadly I've found that most sources prefer to be academically rigorous over quickly comprehensible. Of course it's good that people have done the academic work, but it can be tragically comical how obtuse an academic paper can make a simple concept.
However, one of the most recommended books on the subject is available online, so you might want to check that out.
Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications by Richard Szeliski
re: your first comment... I'm reminded of a lot of the wikipedia pages on mathematical concepts. Sometimes I have to laugh, because they seem so high-level that only someone who already understood the domain could understand them.
