Temporal Consistent Fast Stereo Matching for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)

In this paper, we present a new fast method for matching stereo images acquired by a stereo sensor embedded in a moving vehicle. The method consists in exploiting the matching results obtained in one stereo pair (frame) for computing the disparity map of the following stereo pair. This can be achieved by finding a temporal relationship, which we named association, between consecutive frames. The disparity range of the current frame is deduced from the disparity map of the preceding frame and the association between the two frames. Dynamic programming technique is considered for matching the image features. The proposed approach is tested on virtual and real stereo image sequences and the results are satisfactory. The method is fast and able to provide about 20 millions disparity maps per second on a HP Pavilion dv6700 2.1GHZ.