Exploiting Walsh-based attributes to stereo vision

This paper presents a new stereo feature matching method that extracts the disparity measure for the recovery of depth information in 2-D stereo images. In this method, a stereo pair of images are transformed row for row into strings carrying spatially varying Walsh coefficients as attributes. The significance of the information carried by the Walsh coefficients is expressed mathematically and through experimental evaluations. The choice of the Walsh coefficients in contrast to other orthogonal transform coefficients is a direct result of their computational simplicity and their interpretative meaning in terms of the information contained in the spatial domain. The string-to-string matching technique used to bring the two strings into correspondence integrates, into a unified process, both the feature detection and the feature matching processes. The uniqueness and the ordering constraints are explicitly integrated into this string-to-string matching technique. Both the issues of Gaussian filtering and the importance of enforcing the epipolar line constraint are addressed in view of the application of the proposed method. Experimental results are given and assessed in terms of both the accuracy in stereo matching and the ensuing computational requirements