AN INTENSITY-BASED COOPERATIVE BIDIRECTIONAL STEREO MATCHING WITH SIMULTANEOUS DETECTION OF DISCONTINUITIES AND OCCLUSIONS

This paper presents a new intensity-based stereo algorithm using coope rative bidirectional matching with a hierarchical multilevel structure . Based on a new model of piecewise smooth depth fields and the consis tency constraint, the algorithm is able to estimate the 3-D structure and detect its discontinuities and the occlusion reliably with low com putational costs. In order to find the global optimal estimates, we ut ilize a multiresolution two-stage algorithm minimizing nonconvex cost functions, which is equivalent to the MAP estimation. This basic frame work computing the 3-D structure from binocular stereo images has been extended to the trinocular stereo vision for a further improvement of the performance. A few examples for the binocular and trinocular ster eo problems are given to illustrate the performance of the new algorit hms.