Stereo matching by integrating piecewise surfaces matched in subranges of depth

A new approach is proposed to deal with the stereo matching problem. Based on the assumption that the scene is composed of some piecewise continuous surfaces, two stereo images can be considered to be composed of patches which can be matched continuously between two images. To find the matching of such patches, we divide the range of the depth in the scene into small intervals, and find continuous matchings of segments into the epipolar line in each small interval. Then the continuously matched segments are merged into patches, by considering the continuity between epipolar lines. The matchings of patches obtained in individual intervals, which may partially conflict or overlap with each other, are integrated to obtain the matchings of patches in the whole scene by considering the consistency among the matchings of patches