Stereo image databases for flight simulators

One of the goals of a computer vision system is to recover the three dimensional shape of a surface from its image intensities. One of the ways in which this goal can be achieved is by matching certain feature points in stereo images. Since a sparse depth map is obtained from this process, surface interpolation is also required. The authors describe an algorithm to generate a three dimensional terrain from a pair of stereo images using feature point matching. They discuss an extension to the stereo algorithm for the generation of three dimensional terrain by using the depth map to construct the terrain. A radial sweep algorithm is used to construct the three dimensional terrain from the data generated from the stereo algorithm