Local Smoothness Enforced Cost Volume Regularization for Fast Stereo Correspondence

A novel cost volume regularization algorithm is proposed. It successfully combines weighted cost aggregation in local stereo methods and smoothness constraints in global stereo methods. By enforcing local smoothness during the weighted cost aggregation on the horizontal tree structure, cost distribution can be well regularized. Accurate disparity results with sharp boundary can be generated while keeping extremely low computational amount. A new post-processing method is also proposed. The whole stereo correspondence algorithm achieves competitive performance on the Middlebury stereo testbed in terms of both accuracy and speed.