Reliable Stereo Matching With Depth Measurement in Video Frames Using FPGA

The emerging market of digital 3-D film productions in HD resolution leads to the need for high-quality equipment in the production chain. First, the images are treated in order to improve their pixel to pixel correspondence and reduce illumination differences. After that, stereo matching is addressed using different methods with emphasis on local ones like the sum of absolute distances and normalized cross correlation. A lowcomplexity depth-reliability-based stereo matching algorithm and an efficient scanline memory-merging implementation scheme are proposed. A bidirectional depth propagation flow is then adopted to fill the unreliable segments by using reliable information. Moreover, a set of predefined function-specific reliability variables are extracted to further improve depth quality in the occluded and smooth regions, which can reduce 39% bad pixels obtained by applying the basic 7 × 7 window-based matching. The proposed scanline memory-merging scheme along with data prefetching can lead to 32.7% savings on the scanline memory area and relax the requirements of external frame buffer size and