Edge-Preserving Stereo Matching Using Minimum Spanning Tree

Despite that the accuracy and efficiency of stereo matching technology have significantly improved in the past decades, the issue of edge-blurring remains a challenge to most of the existing approaches. In this paper, we propose a minimum spanning tree (MST) based stereo matching method by using the image edge and segmentation optimization to preserve the image boundary. We first exploit a fast disparity range estimation method by combining the Surf and Akaze feature points to improve the computational efficiency. Second, we utilize the image edges and brightness information to generate a self-adaptive weight function, which is able to significantly improve the accuracy of MST aggregating in the regions of complex texture and boundaries with similar color distribution. Third, we employ the image segmentation to extract the invalid regions of the estimated disparity map, and propose a post-processing scheme to refine the disparity result. Finally, we run our method on several Middlebury and KITTI datasets. The comparison results between our method and other state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate that the proposed method has high accuracy for disparity computation and is especially robust to the edge-blurring.