The Stereo Problem

Consider the pair of images in figure 1. At a first glance they may look identical but closer inspection shows small variations. In fact this is a stereo pair, a pair of images obtained from slightly different views, just like our left and right eyes see almost but not exactly the same things. As is discussed in the next section, and should be intuitively clear, the differences between the two images give information about the distance to the objects in the scene. To determine these distances, also called depths, from a pair of images is called the stereo problem.