3-D surface description from binocular stereo

A stereo vision system that attempts to achieve robustness with respect to scene characteristics, from textured outdoor scenes to environments composed of highly regular man-made objects is presented. It integrates area-based and feature-based primitives. The area-based processing provides a dense disparity map, and the feature-based processing provides an accurate location of discontinuities. An area-based cross correlation, an ordering constraint, and a weak surface smoothness assumption are used to produce an initial disparity map. This disparity map is only a blurred version of the true one because of the smoothing introduced by the cross correlation. The problem can be reduced by introducing edge information. The disparity map is smoothed and the unsupported points removed. This method gives an active role to edgels parallel to the epipolar lines, whereas they are discarded in most feature-based systems. Very good results have been obtained on complex scenes in different domains