A Fast Stereo Matching Method

Stereo matching is important in the area of computer vision and photogrammetry. This paper presents a fast stereo matching algorithm which produces a dense disparity map by using a pyramid structure, fast correlation and dynamic programming techniques. Fast correlation is achieved by using the box filtering technique which is invariant to the size of the correlation window. The disparity for each scan line is found in the correlation matrix by finding the best path using dynamic programming rather than simply choosing the position that gives the maximum correlation coefficient. Both synthetic and real image tests have been performed, and good results have been obtained.