Stereo Matching Based On Census Transformation Of Image Gradients

Although multiple-view matching provides certain significant advantages regarding accuracy, occlusion handling and radiometric fidelity, stereo-matching remains indispensable for a variety of applications; these involve cases when image acquisition requires fixed geometry and limited number of images or speed. Such instances include robotics, autonomous navigation, reconstruction from a limited number of aerial/satellite images, industrial inspection and augmented reality through smart-phones. As a consequence, stereo-matching is a continuously evolving research field with growing variety of applicable scenarios. In this work a novel multi-purpose cost for stereo-matching is proposed, based on census transformation on image gradients and evaluated within a local matching scheme. It is demonstrated that when the census transformation is applied on gradients the invariance of the cost function to changes in illumination (non-linear) is significantly strengthened. The calculated cost values are aggregated through adaptive support regions, based both on cross-skeletons and basic rectangular windows. The matching algorithm is tuned for the parameters in each case. The described matching cost has been evaluated on the Middlebury stereo-vision 2006 datasets, which include changes in illumination and exposure. The tests verify that the census transformation on image gradients indeed results in a more robust cost function, regardless of aggregation strategy.