The past few years have seen a growing interest in the application" of three-dimensional image processing. With the increasing demand for 3-D spatial information for tasks of passive navigation [7,12], automatic surveillance [9], aerial cartography [10,13], and inspection in industrial automation, the importance of effective stereo analysis has been made quite clear. A particular challenge is to provide reliable and accurate depth data for input to object or terrain modelling systems (such as [5]. This paper describes an algorithm for such stereo sensing It uses an edge-based line-by-line stereo correlation scheme, and appears to be fast, robust, and parallel implementable. The processing consists of extracting edge descriptions for a stereo pair of images, linking these edges to their nearest neighbors to obtain the edge connectivity structure, correlating the edge descriptions on the basis of local edge properties, then cooperatively removmg those edge correspondences determined to be in error - those which violate the connectivity structure of the two images. A further correlation process, using a technique similar to that used for the edges, is applied to the image intensity values over intervals defined by the previous correlation The result of the processing is a full image array disparity map of the scene viewed.
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