Efficient and Robust Correspondence Detection between Unbalanced Stereo Images

This paper presents an efficient and robust approach for determining the correspondence between unbalanced stereo images. The disparity vectors were used instead of feature points, such as corners, to calculate a correspondence relationship. For a faster and optimal estimation, the vectors were classified into several regions, and the homography of each region was calculated using the RANSAC algorithm. The correspondence image was calculated from the images transformed by each homography. Although it provided good results under normal conditions, it was difficult to obtain reliable results in an unbalanced stereo pair. Therefore, a balancing method is also proposed to minimize the unbalance effects using the histogram specification and structural similarity index. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach outperformed the baseline algorithms with respect to the speed and peak-signal-to-noise ratio. This work can be applied to practical fields including 3D depth map acquisition, fast stereo coding, 2D-to-3D conversion, etc.