Reliable stereo matching for highly-safe intelligent vehicles and its VLSI implementation

To realize highly-safe intelligent vehicles, high-speed acquisition of reliable three-dimensional(3-D) information is essential. Stereo vision is a well-known method for three-dimensional instrumentation. A major issue of stereo vision is to establish reliable correspondence between images. This paper presents a reliable stereo-matching algorithm based on SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences) computation. Reliable correspondence can be established by selecting a desirable window size of the SAD computation based on the uniqueness of a minimum of the SAD graph. A pixel-serial serial and window-parallel architecture is also proposed to achieve 100% utilization of processing elements. The performance of the VLSI processor is evaluated to be more than ten thousand times higher than that of a general-purpose processor.