Intrinsic color correction for stereo matching

The improvement of color similarity between stereo images can bring better performance to stereo matching algorithms. For this purpose, we present a color correction method to alleviate the color discrepancy between a pair of stereo images, so that the color appearance of one image, i.e., the target image, is consistent with the other image, i.e., the source image. Our method starts with decomposing both the target image and the source image into two intrinsic layers, i.e., the reflectance layer and the shading layer, using intrinsic decomposition. The purpose of intrinsic decomposition is to distinguish and then process different color discrepancies caused by different factors (shading and reflectance) separately and appropriately. Then, a practical and effective consistent segmentation algorithm, which applied to the original stereo images, is proposed to establish the region correspondences. Next, luminance correction method and color correction method, based on the local region correspondences, are adopted to correct the shading layer and the reflectance layer in the target image, respectively, making them as similar as possible to those of the source image. Eventually, the two corrected layers of the target image are combined to yield the final corrected image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, which using intrinsic decomposition to handle color discrepancy caused by different factors, not only enhances the visual color similarity between the stereo images but also improves the accuracy of their stereo matching. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.