INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL APPLICATION Fast spatio-temporal stereo for intelligent transportation systems

This paper presents a fast approach for matching stereoscopic images acquired by stereo cameras mounted aboard a moving car. The proposed approach exploits the spatio-temporal consistency between consecutive frames in stereo sequences to improve matching results. This means that the matching process at current frame uses the matching results obtained at its preceding one. The preceding frame allows to compute an Initial Disparity Map for the current frame. The initial disparity map is used to derive disparity ranges for each scanline as well as what we call Matching Control Edge Points. Dynamic programming is performed for matching edge points in stereo pairs. The matching control edge points are used to drive the search for an optimal solution in the search plane. This is accomplished by dividing the dynamic programming search space into a number of subspaces depending on the number of the matching control edge points. The proposed approach has been tested both on virtual and real stereo images sequences demonstrating satisfactory performance.