ANALOG COMPUTATION FOR PHASE-BASED DISPARITY ESTIMATION - CONTINUOUS AND DISCRETE MODELS

The analog implementation of a phase-based technique for disparity est imation is discussed. This technique is based on the convolution of im ages with Gabor filters. The article shows that by replacing the Gauss ian envelope with other envelopes, the convolution operation is equiva lent to the solution of a system of differential equations, whose orde r is related to the smoothness of the kernel. A detailed comparison be tween the disparity estimates obtained using these kernels and those o btained using the standard filter is presented. The discretization of the model leads to lattice networks in which the number of connections per node required to perform convolution is limited to the first few nearest neighbors. The short connection length makes these filter suit able for analog VLSI implementation, for which the number of connectio n per node is a crucial factor. Experimental measures on a prototype C MOS 17-node chip validated the approach.