Intensity based stereo vision: from 3-D to 3-D

In this paper, we present a new intensity based technique for recovering depth information from two or more images. Our method uses planar patches to approximate 3-D surfaces. In order to recover the depth information, the view-line constraint and the imaging geometry are introduced. The view-line constraint is used to restrict the position of a planar patch. From the constraint we can get the candidates of the corresponding planar patch. The imaging geometry will then help us to find the best estimation from the candidates. A hypothesis and verification based optimization procedure is used. We project each candidate of the planar patch perspectively onto the observed images, and calculate the intensity difference between the projected image and the observed images. The candidate which has the best fitting with the observed data will be selected as the solution. This method is different from the traditional stereo algorithms because it does not require to solve the corresponding problem.