Robust correspondence methods for stereo vision

Correspondence is one of the major problems that must be solved in stereo vision. Correlation has been commonly used in the past for this problem. However, most classical linear correlation methods fail near depth discontinuities and in the presence of occlusions. Many robust methods have been proposed that claim to effectively deal with some or all of these issues. Many of these robust methods are transformation-based, however, other robust methods are non-transformation based. This paper gives five requirements that should be met by a transformation-based robust correlation method. We compare some of the robust correspondence methods and demonstrate their utility on different data sets. Based on these results, we propose a solution to the correspondence problem which represents a compromise between the speed of classical correlation and the improved results obtained from a more robust correspondence method. Also, we propose a median filtering technique that removes noise from the disparity maps while preserving certain image features usually removed by ordinary median filtering.