Stereo matching using weighted dynamic programming on a single-direction four-connected tree

In recent years, stereo matching based on dynamic programming (DP) has been widely studied and various tree structures are proposed to improve the matching accuracy. However, previous DP-based algorithms do not incorporate all the smoothness functions determined by the edges between the adjacent pixels in the image, which will usually lead to lower matching accuracies. In this paper, we propose a novel stereo matching algorithm based on weighted dynamic programming on a single-direction four-connected (SDFC) tree. The SDFC tree structure is a new tree structure which includes all the edges in the image and the disparity of a pixel can be affected by all the edges in the image. However, in the SDFC tree, conventional DP-based algorithms will make the pixels that are far away from the root node provide higher energy than the nearby pixels, which will decrease the matching accuracy. So, the weighted dynamic programming approach is proposed to optimize the energy function on the new tree structure, and all the pixels in the SDFC tree are treated equivalently. Dynamic programming in the SDFC tree of every pixel in the image separately is very time-consuming, so a fast DP optimization method is designed for the SDFC tree, which reduces the computational complexity of the proposed weighted DP algorithm to 12 times of conventional DP based algorithm. Experiments show that our algorithm not only produces quite smooth and reasonable disparity maps which are close to the state-of-the-art results, but also can be implemented quite efficiently. Performance evaluations on the Middlebury data set show that our method ranks top in all the DP-based stereo matching algorithms, even better than the algorithms that apply segmentation techniques. Experimental results in an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) test bed show that our algorithm gets very good matching results in different outdoor conditions, even on the asphaltic road which is considered to be textureless. This illustrates the robustness of our algorithm. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.