Disparity map enhancement in pixel based stereo matching method using distance transform

Abstract

With the great success in three-dimensional (3D) movies, a lot of 3D content have been generated. Depth information is one of the important elements in 3D content generation. Stereo matching methods obtain depth information using the characteristic of binocular disparity. These methods find corresponding points between two images which have different viewpoints to calculate the disparity value. However, these methods have difficulties computing accurate disparity values in the textureless region. Smeared pixels near the edge region also make difficult for the stereo matching. In this paper, we propose a pixel based cost computation for the cross-scale stereo matching using the distance transform to improve these problems. In addition, the disparity error detection and correction methods are also proposed as a post-processing step. As a result, we obtain the enhanced disparity map which is robust to the textureless region and the edge region.