Fast panoramic stereo matching using cylindrical maximum surfaces

This paper presents a fast panoramic stereo matching algorithm using a cylindrical maximum surface technique. The disparity for a pair of panoramic images is found in a cylindrical shaped correlation coefficient volume by obtaining the maximum surface rather than simply choosing a position that gives the maximum correlation coefficient value. The use of our cylindrical maximum surface technique ensures that the disparities obtained at the left and the right columns of the panoramic stereo images are properly constrained. Typical running time for a pair of 1324 × 120 images is about 0.33 s on a 1.7-GHz PC. A variety of real images have been tested, and good results have been obtained.