Stereo correspondence using efficient hierarchical belief propagation

In this paper, a new algorithm is presented to compute the disparity map from a stereo pair of images by using Belief Propagation (BP). While many algorithms have been proposed in recent years, the real-time computation of an accurate disparity map is still a challenging task. The computation time and run-time memory requirements are two very important factors for all real-time applications. The proposed algorithm divides the matching process into two steps; they are initial matching and disparity map refinement. Initial matching is performed by memory efficient hierarchical belief propagation algorithm that uses less than half memory at run-time and minimizes the energy function at much faster rate as compare to other hierarchical BP algorithms that makes it more suitable for real-time applications. Disparity map refinement uses a simple but very effective single-pass approach that improves the accuracy without affecting the computation cost. Experiments by using Middlebury dataset demonstrate that the performance of our algorithm is the best among other real-time stereo matching algorithms.