Anisotropic reaction-diffusion stereo algorithm

This paper presents a reaction-diffusion stereo algorithm with anisotropic diffusion. The reaction-diffusion stereo algorithm detects the stereo disparity, by finding a one-to-one stereo correspondence between the left and right images. There is often ambiguity in finding stereo correspondences because of a lack of texture or similar brightness patterns in objects. In addition, in occluded areas, there is no information by which to find stereo correspondence. Thus, it is necessary to fill in undetected areas of stereo disparity from neighbouring detected areas on a stereo disparity map according to the two constraints of uniqueness and continuity. The reaction-diffusion stereo algorithm realises the continuity constraint with the two different diffusion processes of activation and inhibition. Motivated by psychological evidence from actual human stereo depth perception, this paper proposes the imposition of anisotropic inhibitory diffusion on the algorithm. We apply the proposed anisotropic reaction-diffusion algorithm to several pairs of stereo images and evaluate its performance in comparison to the original reaction-diffusion stereo algorithm. Results of the evaluations show that the addition of anisotropic inhibitory diffusion is partially effective in depth discontinuity areas.