Multiple candidates and multiple constraints based accurate depth estimation for multi-view stereo

In this paper, we propose a depth estimation method for multi-view image sequence. To enhance the accuracy of dense matching and reduce the inaccurate matching which is produced by inaccurate feature description, we select multiple matching points to build candidate matching sets. Then we compute an optimal depth from a candidate matching set which satisfies multiple constraints (epipolar constraint, similarity constraint and depth consistency constraint). To further increase the accuracy of depth estimation, depth consistency constraint of neighbor pixels is used to filter the inaccurate matching. On this basis, in order to get more complete depth map, depth diffusion is performed by neighbor pixels’ depth consistency constraint. Through experiments on the benchmark datasets for multiple view stereo, we demonstrate the superiority of proposed method over the state-of-the-art method in terms of accuracy.