Hierarchical region based stereo matching

Often, stereo matching is treated as two quite independent subprocesses: segmentation, followed by matching. In this paper, we treat these processes as naturally related, with partial matching results feeding back into the segmentation and both proceeding simultaneously in a cooperative fashion. We consider regions as the primitives to be matched, and our implementation is based upon maintaining a hierarchy of segmented regions in each image, corresponding to analysis at diiering scales. The selection of a particular segmentation for a region at an appropriate scale in one image is validated with reference to the optimal matching region in the other image. We present examples of our methods applied to image of real ooce scenes.