Semi-global matching: A principled derivation in terms of message passing

Abstract

Semi-global matching, originally introduced in the context of dense stereo, is a very successful heuristic to minimize the energy of a pairwise multi-label Markov Random Field defined on a grid. We offer the first principled explanation of this empirically successful algorithm, and clarify its exact relation to belief propagation and tree-reweighted message passing. One outcome of this new connection is an uncertainty measure for the MAP label of a variable in a Markov Random Field.