Stereo and Active-Sensor Data Fusion for Improved Stereo Block Matching

This paper proposes an algorithm which uses the depth information acquired from an active sensor as guidance for a block matching stereo algorithm. In the proposed implementation, the disparity search interval used for the block matching is reduced around the depth values obtained from the active sensor, which leads to an improved matching quality and denser disparity maps and point clouds. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by carrying out a series of experiments on 3 different data sets obtained from different robotic systems. We demonstrate with experimental results that the disparity estimation is improved and denser disparity maps are generated.