Real-Time FPGA Accelerated Stereo Matching for Temporal Statistical Pattern Projector Systems

The presented paper describes a hardware-accelerated field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based solution capable of real-time stereo matching for temporal statistical pattern projector systems. Modern 3D measurement systems have seen an increased use of temporal statistical pattern projectors as their active illumination source. The use of temporal statistical patterns in stereo vision systems includes the advantage of not requiring information about pattern characteristics, enabling a simplified projector design. Stereo-matching algorithms used in such systems rely on the locally unique temporal changes in brightness to establish a pixel correspondence between the stereo image pair. Finding the temporal correspondence between individual pixels in temporal image pairs is computationally expensive, requiring GPU-based solutions to achieve real-time calculation. By leveraging a high-level synthesis approach, matching cost simplification, and FPGA-specific design optimizations, an energy-efficient, high throughput stereo-matching solution was developed. The design is capable of calculating disparity images on a 1024 x 1024(@291 FPS) input image pair stream at 8.1 W on an embedded FPGA platform (ZC706). Several different design configurations were tested, evaluating device utilization, throughput, power consumption, and performance-per-watt. The average performance-per-watt of the FPGA solution was two times higher than in a GPU-based solution.