Stereo matching deals with recovering quantitative
depth information from a set of input images, based on the visual
disparity between corresponding points. Generally most of the
algorithms assume that the processed images are rectified. As
robotics becomes popular, conducting stereo matching in the
context of cloth manipulation, such as obtaining the disparity
map of the garments from the two cameras of the cloth folding
robot, is useful and challenging. This is resulted from the fact of
the high efficiency, accuracy and low memory requirement under
the usage of high resolution images in order to capture the details
(e.g. cloth wrinkles) for the given application (e.g. cloth folding).
Meanwhile, the images can be unrectified. Therefore, we propose
to adapt guided filtering algorithm into the pyramidical stereo
matching framework that works directly for unrectified images.
To evaluate the proposed unrectified stereo matching in terms of
accuracy, we present three datasets that are suited to especially
the characteristics of the task of cloth manipulations. By com-
paring the proposed algorithm with two baseline algorithms on
those three datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed approach
is accurate, efficient and requires low memory. This also shows
that rather than relying on image rectification, directly applying
stereo matching through the unrectified images can be also quite
effective and meanwhile efficien
