Secrets of adaptive support weight techniques for local stereo matching

In recent years, local stereo matching algorithms have again become very popular in the stereo community. This is mainly due to the introduction of adaptive support weight algorithms that can for the first time produce results that are on par with global stereo methods. The crux in these adaptive support weight methods is to assign an individual weight to each pixel within the support window. Adaptive support weight algorithms differ mainly in the manner in which this weight computation is carried out. In this paper we present an extensive evaluation study. We evaluate the performance of various methods for computing adaptive support weights including the original bilateral filter-based weights, as well as more recent approaches based on geodesic distances or on the guided filter. To obtain reliable findings, we test these different weight functions on a large set of 35 ground truth disparity pairs. We have implemented all approaches on the GPU, which allows for a fair comparison of run time on modern hardware platforms. Apart from the standard local matching using fronto-parallel windows, we also embed the competing weight functions into the recent PatchMatch Stereo approach, which uses slanted sub-pixel windows and represents a state-of-the-art local algorithm. In the final part of the paper, we aim at shedding light on general points of adaptive support weight matching, which, for example, includes a discussion about symmetric versus asymmetric support weight approaches. (c) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.