Iterated dynamic programming and quadtree subregioning for fast stereo matching

The application of energy minimisation methods for stereo matching has been demonstrated to produce high quality disparity maps. However, the majority of these methods are known to be computationally expensive requiring minutes of computation. In this paper, we propose a fast minimisation scheme that produces high quality stereo reconstructions for significantly reduced running time, requiring only a few seconds of computation. The minimisation scheme is carried out using our iterated dynamic programming algorithm, which iterates over entire rows and columns for fast stereo matching. A quadtree subregioning process is also used for efficient computation of a matching cost volume where iterated dynamic programming operates on. 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V.