Surface Orientation From Binocular Stereo Orientational Disparity

Consider a binocular stereo system observing a textured surface patch that is oriented in depth. Due to the geometry of the situation, a given texture element on the surface will appear with differing orientations in the binocular projections. The differential image orientation of corresponding elements in binocular projections is referred to as orientational disparity. An analysis of stereoscopic projection is presented that explicitly relates three-dimensional surface orientation to orientational disparity. This analysis allows for the specification of relations for recovering three-dimensional surface orientation from local measures of binocular stereo disparity.