A multistage stereo method giving priority to reliable matching

This paper describes a reliable feature-based stereo matching method which determines more reliable pairs of matching edges earlier than less reliable ones and makes use of previous matching results. The contrast of an edge point is used as the measure of reliability of the match because an edge with high contrast has high positional and directional accuracy. The decisions of whether there are correspondences between pairs of lower contrast edges or not become easier because previously found more reliable matching results are available to reduce the occurrences of ambiguous matches. Experiments with complicated indoor scenes proved that the proposed method is better than those which do not consider reliability.