A New Depth and Disparity Visualization Algorithm for Stereoscopic Camera Rig

Abstract

In this paper, we present the effect of binocular cues which plays crucial role for the visualization of a stereoscopic or 3D image. This study is useful in extracting depth and disparity information by image processing technique. A linear relation between the object distance and the image distance is presented to discuss the cause of cybersickness. In the experimental results, three dimensional view of the depth map between the 2D images is shown. A median filter is used to reduce the noises available in the disparity map image. After the median filter, two filter algorithms such as ‘Gabor’ filter and ‘Canny’ filter are tested for disparity visualization between two images. The ‘Gabor’ filter is to estimate the disparity by texture extraction and discrimination methods of the two images, and the ‘Canny’ filter is used to visualize the disparity by edge detection of the two color images obtained from stereoscopic cameras. The ‘Canny’ filter is better choice for estimating the disparity rather than the ‘Gabor’ filter because the ‘Canny’ filter is much more efficient than ‘Gabor’ filter in terms of detecting the edges. ‘Canny’ filter changes the color images directly into color edges without converting them into the grayscale. As a result, more clear edges of the stereo images as compared to the edge detection by ‘Gabor’ filter can be obtained. Since the main goal of the research is to estimate the horizontal disparity of all possible regions or edges of the images, thus the ‘Canny’ filter is proposed for decipherable visualization of the disparity.