Radiometric invariant stereo matching based on relative gradients

Colors images produced by current sensors are affected by many environmental factors resulting in the fact that even for the same illumination conditions, corresponding pixels in stereo pairs cannot be guaranteed to have the same color. In many cases, color based stereo matching is not a good choice to compute a good disparity maps. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem by using a relative gradient algorithm. Boundary and low texture problems are resolved by using a Gaussian weighting function and by limiting the search range. The experimental results show the proposed local method is effective and robust, and even outperforms some of the well-known global methods.