Hierarchical stereo correspondence using features of gray connected components

In this paper, a new feature-based method for the correspondence problem is proposed. The used feature is the boundary of a parameter-dependent connected component of an image which is introduced in. In general, there is no one- to-one relationship between the points of a pair stereo images. We prove that under certain conditions, there is such a relationship between the sets of the boundary points of the connected components of the stereo images. This correspondence may be identified through the epipolar geometry. Furthermore, since such connected components may represent some meaningful objects in images, we may obtain the corresponding objects directly, instead of only the corresponding points or lines as in some other methods which need the process of feature grouping to conduct further analysis. Also, a hierarchy of the connected components provides us a coarse-to-fine matching method to recover the surface corresponding to a connected component.