Hierarchical region based stereo matching

Stereo matching is the process of determining correspondences between entities in related images. Often, this is treated as two quite independent subprocesses, namely, segmentation, followed by matching. These processes are treated as naturally related, in that partial matching is fed back to the segmentation and both proceed simultaneously in a cooperative fashion. Regions are considered as the primitives to be matched, since many of the shortcomings inherent in approaches based on points or lines can be overcome by taking more developed entities. The implementation is based on maintaining a hierarchy of segmented regions in each image, corresponding to analysis at differing scales. The selection of a particular segmentation in each image at a scale appropriate to each region is validated with reference to the optimal matching region in the other image. Examples of these methods, applied to a synthetic image (incorporating color) and to natural office scenes, are presented