Stereo rectification of calibrated image pairs based on geometric transformation

The objective of stereo rectification is to make the corresponding epipolar lines of image pairs be parallel to the horizontal direction, so that the efficiency of stereo matching is improved as the corresponding points stay in the same horizontal lines of both images. In this paper,a simple and convenient rectification method of calibrated image pairs based on geometric transformation is proposed, which can avoid the complicated calculation of many previous algorithms such as based on epipolar lines, based on fundamental matrix or directly depend on corresponding points. This method is divided into two steps including coordinate system transformation and re-projection of image points. Firstly, we establish two virtual cameras with parallel optical axis by coordinate system transformation based on the pose relationship of the two cameras from calibration result. Secondly, we re-project the points of the original image onto new image planes of the virtual cameras through geometrical method, and then realized the stereo rectification. Experiments of real stereo image pairs show that the proposed method is able to realize the rectification of stereo image pairs accurately and efficiently.

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