A flexible and configurable GPGPU stereo matching framework

Abstract

This paper presents a practical framework that consists of various local to global stereo matching algorithms on a general purpose computing on graphics processing units platform. The flexible framework provides users with a selection of individual sub-algorithms in each step of stereo matching. The framework runs on either a central processing unit or graphic processing unit across three different platforms, including a smartphone, embedded board, and desktop. On the basis of the proposed framework, we investigate different combinations of stereo matching algorithms for specific use cases. Accordingly, we provide the framework’s quantitative speed and accuracy analysis evaluated on the widely used stereo dataset. In addition, this paper also addresses the parallelization strategy on an embedded graphics processing unit. The experimental results show that the proposed framework is capable of real-time and accurate depth estimation of stereo input in video graphics array resolution on an embedded graphics processing unit.