Abstract
A critical issue in area-based stereo matching lies in selecting a fixed rectangular window size. Previous stereo methods doesn't deal effectively with occluding boundary due to inevitable window-based problems, and so give inaccurate and noisy matching results in areas with steep disparity variations. In this paper, a variable window approach is presented to estimate accurate, detailed and smooth disparities for three-dimensional structure reconstruction. It makes the smoothing of depth discontinuity reduced by evaluating corresponding correlation values and intensity gradient-based similarity in the three-dimensional disparity space. In addition, it investigates maximum connected match candidate points and then devise the novel arbitrarily shaped variable window representative of a same disparity to treat with disparity variations of various structure shapes. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed variable window method with synthetic images, and show how our results improve on those of closely related techniques for accuracy, robustness, matching density and computing speed.