STEREO MATCHING ALGORITHM BASED ON ILLUMINATION CONTROL TO IMPROVE THE ACCURACY

Abstract

This paper presents a new method of pixel based stereo matching algorithm using illumination control. The state of the art algorithm for absolute difference (AD) works fast, but only precise at low texture areas. Besides, it is sensitive to radiometric distortions (i.e., contrast or brightness) and discontinuity areas. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes an algorithm that utilizes an illumination control to enhance the image quality of absolute difference (AD) matching. Thus, pixel intensities at this step are more consistent, especially at the object boundaries. Then, the gradient difference value is added to empower the reduction of the radiometric errors. The gradient characteristics are known for its robustness with regard to the radiometric errors. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs much better when using a standard benchmarking dataset from the Middlebury Stereo Vision dataset. The main contribution of this work is a reduction of discontinuity errors that leads to a significant enhancement on matching quality and accuracy of disparity maps.