A novel method to generate a high-quality image by using a stereo camera

In this paper, we propose a stereo camera system composed of a monochrome camera capturing a high-quality monochrome image and a color camera acquiring color information of a scene. By fusing two images captured from each camera, the proposed stereo camera system generates a high-quality color image. In the proposed method, stereo matching is first performed in which the color image is aligned with the monochrome image. Then, in the aligned color image, inappropriate regions that contain incorrect color information are removed by using the Gaussian mixture model, and regions without any color information are compensated by using the super-pixel algorithm. The resultant image is obtained by transferring the color information of the modified color image to the monochrome image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can produce high-quality color images.