NOVEL DENSE STEREO ALGORITHMS FOR HIGH-QUALITY DEPTH ESTIMATION FROM IMAGES

This dissertation addresses the problem of inferring scene depth information from a collection of calibrated images taken from different viewpoints via stereo matching. Although it has been heavily investigated for decades, depth from stereo remains a long-standing challenge and popular research topic for several reasons. First of all, in order to be of practical use for many real-time applications such as autonomous driving, accurate depth estimation in real-time is of great importance and one of the core challenges in stereo. Second, for applications such as 3D reconstruction and view synthesis, high-quality depth estimation is crucial to achieve photo realistic results. However, due to the matching ambiguities, accurate dense depth estimates are difficult to achieve. Last but not least, most stereo algorithms rely on identification of corresponding points among images and only work effectively when scenes are Lambertian. For non-Lambertian surfaces, the brightness constancy assumption is no longer valid. This dissertation contributes three novel stereo algorithms that are motivated by the specific requirements and limitations imposed by different applications. In addressing high speed depth estimation from images, we present a stereo algorithm that achieves high quality results while maintaining real-time performance. We introduce an adaptive aggregation step in a dynamic-programming framework. Matching costs are aggregated in the vertical direction using a computationally expensive weighting scheme based on color and distance proximity. We utilize the vector processing capability and parallelism in commodity graphics hardware to speed up this process over two orders of magnitude. In addressing high accuracy depth estimation, we present a stereo model that makes use of constraints from points with known depths - the Ground Control Points (GCPs) as referred to in stereo literature. Our formulation explicitly models the influences of GCPs in a Markov Random Field. A novel regularization prior is naturally integrated into a global inference framework in a principled way using the Bayes rule. Our probabilistic framework allows GCPs to be obtained from various modalities and provides a natural way to integrate information from various sensors. In addressing non-Lambertian reflectance, we introduce a new invariant for stereo correspondence which allows completely arbitrary scene reflectance (bidirectional reflectance distribution functions - BRDFs). This invariant can be used to formulate a rank constraint on stereo matching when the scene is observed by several lighting configurations in which only the lighting intensity varies

Implementation of Stereo Matching Using High Level Compiler for Parallel Computing Acceleration

International audienceHeterogeneous computing system increases the performance of parallel computing in many domain of general purpose computing with CPU, GPU and other accelerators. With Hardware developments, the software developments like Compute Unified Device Architecture(CUDA) and Open Computing Language (OpenCL) try to offer a simple and visualized tool for parallel computing. But it turn out to be more difficult than programming on CPU platform for optimization of performance. For one kind of parallel computing application, there are different configuration and parameters for various hardware platforms. In this paper, we apply the Hybrid Multi-cores Parallel Programming(HMPP) to automatic-generates tunable code for GPU platform and show the result of implementation of Stereo Matching with detailed comparison with C code version and manual CUDA version. The experimental results show that the default and optimized HMPP have the approximative 1 compared with CUDA implementation. And the HMPP workbench can greatly reduce the time of application development using parallel computing device

Optimized fixed point implementation of a local stereo matching algorithm onto C66x DSP

International audienceStereo matching techniques aim at reconstructing disparity maps from a pair of images. The use of stereo matching techniques in embedded systems is very challenging due to the complexity of the state-of-the-art algorithms. An efficient local stereo matching algorithm has been chosen from the literature and implemented on a c6678 DSP. Arithmetic simplifications such as approximation by piecewise linear functions and fixed point conversions are proposed. Thanks to factorisation and pre-computing, the memory footprint is reduced by a factor 13 to fit on the memory footprint available on embedded systems. A 14.5 fps speed (factor 60 speed-up) has been reached with a small quality loss on the final disparity map

Fusion of Range and Stereo Data for High-Resolution Scene-Modeling

This work has received funding from Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the MIXCAM project number ANR-13-BS02-0010-01. Georgios Evangelidis is the corresponding author