A fast area-based stereo matching algorithm

This paper presents an area-based stereo algorithm suitable to real time applications. The core of the algorithm relies on the uniqueness constraint and on a matching process that allows for rejecting previous matches as soon as more reliable ones are found. The proposed approach is compared with the left-right consistency constraint, being the latter the basic method for detecting unreliable matches in many area-based stereo algorithms. The algorithm has been carefully optimised to obtain a very fast implementation on a Personal Computer. This paper describes the computational optimisation strategy, which is based on a very effective incremental calculation scheme. Finally, we provide experimental results obtained on stereo pairs with ground-truth as well as computation-time measurements; we compare these data with those obtained using a well-know, fast, area-based algorithm relying on the left-right consistency constraint.