In this paper, we present a hardware design of stereo matching for depth extraction. It is capable of matching high-definition images at real-time speed, producing high-quality disparity maps. The stereo algorithm comprises three major components, i.e. census transform, dynamic programming and local-adaptive voting. The census transform makes our method robust to radiometric differences. The dynamic programming method propagates information along scanlines by imposing a smoothness criterion. The local-adaptive voting further improves the matching quality, utilizing the correlation between intensity images and disparity maps. The whole algorithm is prototyped on a FPGA platform, effectively harnessing the power of parallel computing. With a working frequency of 65MHz, our design can produce high-quality 1024×768 disparity maps at 60fps.

Date Published: 25 February 2012
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8288, Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XXIII, 82882K (25 February 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.906574

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8288:
Stereoscopic Displays and Applications XXIII
Andrew J. Woods; Nicolas S. Holliman; Gregg E. Favalora, Editor(s)