An optimized software-based implementation of a census-based stereo matching algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents S3E, a software implementation of a high-quality dense stereo matching algorithm. The algorithm is based on a Census transform with a large mask size. The strength of the system lies in the flexibility in terms of image dimensions, disparity levels, and frame rates. The program runs on standard PC hardware utilizing various SSE instructions. We describe the performance optimization techniques that had a considerably high impact on the run-time performance. Compared to a generic version of the source code, a speedup factor of 112 could be achieved. On input images of 320x240 and a disparity range of 30, S3E achieves 42fps on an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU running at 2GHz. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.