An improved real-time miniaturized embedded stereo vision system (MESVS-II)

In this paper we describe a fully integrated, real-time, miniaturized embedded stereo vision system (MESVS-II), which fits within 5times5cm and consumes very low power. This is a significant improvement over the original MESVS-I system in terms of performance, quality and accuracy of results. MESVS-II running at 600MHz per core, is capable of operating at up to 20 fps, which is twice as fast as MESVS-I, due to the efficient implementation of stereo-vision algorithms, improved memory and data management, in-place processing scheme, code optimization, and the pipelined-programming model that takes advantage of the dual-core architecture of the embedded processor. The firmware incorporates sub-sampling, rectification, pre-processing, matching, LRC (Left/Right Consistency) check and post-processing. As demonstrated by our experimental results, we have also enhanced the robustness of the stereo-matching engine to radiometric variations by choosing census transform over rank transform.