Real-time stereo matching on CUDA using an iterative refinement method for adaptive support-weight correspondences

High-quality real-time stereo matching has the potential to enable various computer vision applications including semi-automated robotic surgery, teleimmersion, and 3-D video surveillance. A novel real-time stereo matching method is presented that uses a two-pass approximation of adaptive support-weight aggregation, and a low-complexity iterative disparity refinement technique. Through an evaluation of computationally efficient approaches to adaptive support-weight cost aggregation, it is shown that the two-pass method produces an accurate approximation of the support weights while greatly reducing the complexity of aggregation. The refinement technique, constructed using a probabilistic framework, incorporates an additive term into matching cost minimization and facilitates iterative processing to improve the accuracy of the disparity map. This method has been implemented on massively parallel high-performance graphics hardware using the Compute Unified Device Architecture computing engine. Results show that the proposed method is the most accurate among all of the real-time stereo matching methods listed on the Middlebury stereo benchmark.