Dense spatio-temporal stereo matching for intelligent driving systems

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of matching stereo images acquired by a stereo system mounted aboard an intelligent vehicle. The main idea behind the new method consists in involving temporal matching between a current stereo pair and its preceding one to achieve the spatial matching of the former stereo by involving the matching results obtained at the last frame. The proposed method is achieved in three main steps. First, an edge based disparity map is derived from the disparity map of the preceding frame, we call it the assisting disparity map (ADM). Second, for each scan-line, a set of local ranges and global ranges are deduced from the ADM to keep only potential matching candidates. Third, the matching is done on the basis of dynamic programming algorithm by involving in the resulting local and global ranges we get from the last step. The proposed approach has been tested on both real and synthetic stereo sequences and the results demonstrate its effectiveness.