Local Density Encoding for Robust Stereo Matching

Stereo correspondence is challenging under realistic conditions due to uncontrolled factors that affect input images, including illumination inconsistencies and radiometric variations. Many local and global models have been suggested to address these problems; however, their performance is often degraded due to the assumption of color consistency between the left and right images. Therefore, we present a new local pattern, local density encoding, for stereo matching measurements to improve the performance of existing stereo methods. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method is less sensitive to illumination changes and radiometric variations. Moreover, in the cases with normal and severe illumination changes, the proposed method is more robust than state-of-the-art data costs.