An optimal time–space algorithm for dense stereo matching

Gutemberg Guerra-Filho
2010 Journal of Real-Time Image Processing  
The increasing demand for higher resolution images and higher frame rate videos will always pose a challenge to computational power when real-time performance is required to solve the stereo matching problem in 3D reconstruction applications. Therefore, the use of asymptotic analysis is necessary to measure the time and space performance of stereo matching algorithms regardless of the size of the input and of the computational power available. In this paper, we survey several classic stereo
more » ... hing algorithms with regards to time-space complexity. We also report running time experiments for several algorithms that are consistent with our complexity analysis. We present a new dense stereo matching algorithm based on a greedy heuristic path computation in disparity space. A procedure which improves disparity maps in depth discontinuity regions is introduced. This procedure works as a post-processing step for any technique that solves the dense stereo matching problem. We prove that our algorithm and post-processing procedure have optimal O(n) time-space complexity, where n is the size of a stereo image. Our algorithm performs only a constant number of computations per pixel since it avoids a brute force search over the disparity range. Hence, our algorithm is faster than "real-time" techniques while producing comparable results when evaluated with ground-truth benchmarks. The correctness of our algorithm is demonstrated with experiments in real and synthetic data.
doi:10.1007/s11554-010-0161-x fatcat:j3wbfiyogzf55ee2kotpp6khrq