Robust stereo on multiple resolutions

Stereo computation is one of the vision problems where the presence of outliers cannot be neglected. Most standard algorithms make unrealistic assumptions about noise distributions, which leads to erroneous results that cannot be corrected in subsequent postprocessing stages. In this paper we present a modification of the standard area-based correlation approach so that it can tolerate a significant number of outliers. The approach exhibits a robust behavior not only in the presence of mismatches but also in the case of depth discontinuities. The confidence measure of the correlation and the number of outliers provide two complementary sources of information which, when implemented in a multiresolution framework, result in a robust and efficient method. We present the results of this approach on a number of synthetic and real images.