Stereo Fusion Using a Refractive Medium on a Binocular Base

The performance of depth reconstruction in binocular stereo relies on how adequate the predefined baseline for a target scene is. Widebaseline stereo is capable of discriminating depth better than the narrow one, but it often suffers from spatial artifacts. Narrow-baseline stereo can provide a more elaborate depth map with less artifacts, while its depth resolution tends to be biased or coarse due to the short disparity. In this paper, we propose a novel optical design of heterogeneous stereo fusion on a binocular imaging system with a refractive medium, where the binocular stereo part operates as wide-baseline stereo; the refractive stereo module works as narrow-baseline stereo. We then introduce a stereo fusion workflow that combines the refractive and binocular stereo algorithms to estimate fine depth information through this fusion design. The quantitative and qualitative results validate the performance of our stereo fusion system in measuring depth, compared with homogeneous stereo approaches.