Real-time stereo vision system using adaptive weight cost aggregation approach

Many vision applications require high-accuracy dense disparity maps in real time. Due to the complexity of the matching process, most real-time stereo applications rely on local algorithms in the disparity computation. These local algorithms generally suffer from matching ambiguities as it is difficult to find appropriate support for each pixel. Recent research shows that algorithms using adaptive cost aggregation approach greatly improve the quality of disparity map. Unfortunately, although these improvements are excellent, they are obtained at the expense of high computational. This article presents a hardware implementation for speeding up these methods. With hardware friendly approximation, we demonstrate the feasibility of implementing this expensive computational task on hardware to achieve real-time performance. The entire stereo vision system, includes rectification, stereo matching, and disparity refinement, is realized using a single field programmable gate array. The highly parallelized pipeline structure makes system be capable to achieve 51 frames per second for 640 x 480 stereo images. Finally, the success of accuracy improvement is demonstrated on the Middlebury dataset, as well as tests on real scene.