An efficient stereo matching based on fragment matching

We propose a stereo matching method based on image fragments. Unlike traditional pixel-based stereos matching methods, we use edge information in the reference image to divide it into small fragments, and we then use the segments to find the best matching fragments in another reference image from the horizontal and vertical directions. We obtain two disparity maps, and using the match confidence value for each disparity map, we can produce a more accurate disparity map. Next, we calculate the exact disparity value for each pixel within the fragment. Finally, the disparity map is filled and smoothed to obtain the final disparity result. Experiments demonstrated that the proposed method has low computation complexity, high matching accuracy, and the disparity of object edge is clear, and it achieved good performance with the Middlebury and KITTI benchmark.