Accelerating Cost Aggregation for Real-Time Stereo Matching

Real-time stereo matching, which is important in many applications like self-driving cars and 3-D scene reconstruction, requires large computation capability and high memory bandwidth. The most time-consuming part of stereo-matching algorithms is the aggregation of information (i.e. costs) over local image regions. In this paper, we present a generic representation and suitable implementations for three commonly used cost aggregators on many-core processors. We perform typical optimizations on the kernels, which leads to significant performance improvement (up to two orders of magnitude). Finally, we present a performance model for the three aggregators to predict the aggregation speed for a given pair of input images on a given architecture. Experimental results validate our model with an acceptable error margin (an average of 10.4%). We conclude that GPU-like many-cores are excellent platforms for accelerating stereo matching.