Evaluation of LDR, tone mapped and HDR stereo matching using cost-volume filtering approach

We present stereo matching solutions based on a fast cost-volume filtering approach for High Dynamic Range (HDR) scenes. Multi-exposed stereo images are captured and used to generate HDR and Tone Mapped (TM) images of the left and right views. We perform stereo matching on conventional, Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images, original HDR, as well as TM images by customizing the matching algorithm for each of them. An evaluation on the disparity maps computed from the different approaches demonstrates that stereo matching on HDR images outperforms conventional LDR stereo matching and TM stereo matching, with the most discriminative disparity maps achieved by using HDR color information and log-luminance gradient values for matching cost calculation.