Stereoscopic ranging by matching image modulations

We apply an AM-FM surface albedo model to analyze the projection of surface patterns viewed through a binocular camera system. This is used to support the use of modulation-based stereo matching where local image phase is use d to compute stereo disparities. Local image phase is an advantagous featur e for image matching, since the problem of computing disparities reduces to identifying local phase shifts between the stereoscopic image data. Local phase shifts, however, are problematic at high frequencies due to phase wra pping when disparities exceed +/- pi. We meld powerful multichannel Gabor i mage demodulation techniques for multiscale (coarse-to-fine) computation of local image phase with a disparity channel model for depth computation. Th e resulting framework unifies phase-based matching approaches with AM-FM su rface/image models. We demonstrate the concepts in a stereo algorithm that generates a dense, accurate disparity map without the problems associated w ith phase wrapping.