• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.1
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• pp.69-83
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• 2006

This paper describes an image disparity estimation method using a segmented-region based stereo matching. Segmented-region based disparity estimation yields a disparity map as the unit of segmented region. However, there is a problem that it estimates disparity imprecisely. The reason is that because it not only have matching errors but also apply an identical way to disparity estimation, which is not considered each type of matched regions. To solve this problem, we proposes a disparity estimation method which is considered the type of matched regions. That is, the proposed method classifies whole matched regions into similar-matched region, dissimilar-matched region, false-matched region and miss-matched region by analyzing the type of matched regions. We then performs proper disparity estimation for each type of matched regions. This method minimizes the error in estimating disparity which is caused by inaccurate matching and also improves the accuracy of disparity of the well-matched regions. For the purpose of performance evaluations, we perform tests on a variety of scenes for synthetic, indoor and outdoor images. As a result of tests, we can obtain a dense disparity map which has the improved accuracy. The remarkable result is that the accuracy of disparity is also improved considerably for complex outdoor images which are barely treatable in the previous methods.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.49 no.12
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• pp.659-666
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• 2000

A stereo matching has been an important tool for reconstructing three dimensional terrain. By using stereo matching technique, DEM(Digital Elevaton Map) can be generated by the disparity from a reference image to a target image. Generally disparity map can be evaluated by matching the reference image to the target image and if the role of the reference and the target are interchanged, a different DEM can be obtained. In this paper, we propose a new fusion technique to estimate the optimal DEM by eliminating the false DEM due to occlusion. To detect the false DEM, we utilize two measure of accuracy: self-consistency and cross-correlation score. We test the effectiveness of the proposed methods with a quantitative analysis using simulated images. Experimental result indicate that the proposed methods show 24.4% and 33.1% improvement over either DEM.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.54-57
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• 2016

In this paper, the method for an effective and intelligent route decision of the automatic ground vehicle (AGV) using a 2D spatial map of the stereo camera system is proposed. The depth information and disparity map are detected in the inputting images of a parallel stereo camera. The distance between the automatic moving robot and the obstacle detected and the 2D spatial map obtained from the location coordinates, and then the relative distance between the obstacle and the other objects obtained from them. The AGV moves automatically by effective and intelligent route decision using the obtained 2D spatial map. From some experiments on robot driving with 480 frames of the stereo images, it is analyzed that error ratio between the calculated and measured values of the distance between the objects is found to be very low value of 1.57% on average, respectably.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.27 no.7
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• pp.36-48
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• 2010

This paper is concerned with stereo vision-based approach to detect obstacles and to generate the path of destination from the start. The hexapod robot in the experiment is cable of walking by legs and driving by wheels simultaneously. The hexapod robot operates under the driving mode normally, and it changes driving mode to walking mode to overcome obstacles using its legs. Disparity map, which is the correlation between two images taken by stereo camera, is employed for calculation of the distance between the robot and obstacles. When the obstacles information is extracted from the disparity map, the potential field algorithm is applied to create the obstacle-avoidance path. Simulator, based on OpenGL, is developed to generate the graphical path, and the experimental results are shown for the verification of the proposed algorithm.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.42 no.2 s.302
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• pp.101-112
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• 2005

As we perceive the world as 3-dimensional through our two eyes, we can extract 3-dimensional information from stereo images obtained from two or more cameras. Since stereo images have a large amount of data, with recent advances in digital video coding technology, efficient compression algorithms have been developed for stereo images. In order to compress stereo images and to obtain 3-D information such as depth, we find disparity vectors by using disparity estimation algorithm generally utilizing pixel differences between stereo pairs. However, it is not unusual to have stereo images having different intensity values for several reasons, such as incorrect control of the iris of each camera, disagreement of the foci of two cameras, orientation, position, and different characteristics of CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras, and so on. The intensity differences of stereo pairs often cause undesirable problems such as incorrect disparity vectors and consequent low coding efficiency. By compensating intensity differences between left and right images, we can obtain higher coding efficiency and hopefully reduce the perceptual burden of brain to combine different information incoming from two eyes. We propose several methods of intensity compensation such as local intensity compensation, global intensity compensation, and hierarchical intensity compensation as very simple and efficient preprocessing tool. Experimental results show that the proposed algerian provides significant improvement in coding efficiency.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.132-140
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose boundary-preserving stereo matching method based on adaptive disparity adjustment using confidence region detection. To find the initial disparity map, we compute data cost using the color space (CIE Lab) combined with the gradient space and apply double cost aggregation. We perform left/right consistency checking to sort out the mismatched region. This consistency check typically fails for occluded and mismatched pixels. We mark a pixel in the left disparity map as "inconsistent", if the disparity value of its counterpart pixel differs by a value larger than one pixel. In order to distinguish errors caused by the disparity discontinuity, we first detect the confidence map using the Mean-shift segmentation in the initial disparity map. Using this confidence map, we then adjust the disparity map to reduce the errors in initial disparity map. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method produces higher quality disparity maps by successfully preserving disparity discontinuities compared to existing methods.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.501-510
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• 2001

Generally, it is essential to estimate exact disparity for the 3D modeling from stereo images. Because existing methods calculate disparities from a whole image, they require too much cimputational time and bring about the mismatching problem. In this article, using the characteristic that the disparity vectors in stereo images are distributed not equally in a whole image but only exist about the background and obhect, we do a wavelet transformation on stereo images and estimate coarse disparity fields from the reduced lowpass field using area-based method at first-step. From these coarse disparity vectors, we generate disparity histogram and then separate object from background area using it. Afterwards, we restore only object area to the original image and estimate dense and accurate disparity by our two-step pixel-based method which does not use pixel brightness but use second gradient. We also extract feature points from the separated object area and estimate depth information by applying disparity vectors and camera parameters. Finally, we generate 3D model using both feature points and their z coordinates. By using our proposed, we can considerably reduce the computation time and estimate the precise disparity through the additional pixel-based method using LOG filter. Furthermore, our proposed foreground/background method can solve the mismatching problem of existing Delaunay triangulation and generate accurate 3D model.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.1-9
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• 2008

In this paper, to extract object regions in stereo image, we propose an enhanced algorithm that extracts objects combining both of brightness information and disparity information. The approach that extracts objects using both has been studied by Ping and Chaohui. In their algorithm, the segmentation for an input image is carried out using the brightness, and integration of segmented regions in consideration of disparity information within the previously segmented regions. In the regions where the brightness values between object regions and background regions are similar, however, the segmented regions probably include both of object regions and background regions. It may cause incorrect object extraction in the merging process executed in the unit of the segmented region. To solve this problem, in proposed method, we adopt the merging process which is performed in pixel unit. In addition, we perform the bi-directional stereo matching process to enhance reliability of the disparity information and supplement the disparity information resulted from a single directional matching process. Further searching for disparity is decided by edge information of the input image. The proposed method gives good performance in the object extraction since we find the disparity information that is not extracted in the traditional methods. Finally, we evaluate our method by experiments for the pictures acquired from a real stereoscopic camera.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.161-170
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• 2012

This paper presents an efficient and robust approach for determining the correspondence between unbalanced stereo images. The disparity vectors were used instead of feature points, such as corners, to calculate a correspondence relationship. For a faster and optimal estimation, the vectors were classified into several regions, and the homography of each region was calculated using the RANSAC algorithm. The correspondence image was calculated from the images transformed by each homography. Although it provided good results under normal conditions, it was difficult to obtain reliable results in an unbalanced stereo pair. Therefore, a balancing method is also proposed to minimize the unbalance effects using the histogram specification and structural similarity index. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach outperformed the baseline algorithms with respect to the speed and peak-signal-to-noise ratio. This work can be applied to practical fields including 3D depth map acquisition, fast stereo coding, 2D-to-3D conversion, etc.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.517-524
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• 2013

Stereo matching has been grabbing the attention of researchers because it plays an important role in computer vision, remote sensing and photogrammetry. Although most methods perform well with small size images, experiments applying them to large-scale data sets under uncontrolled conditions are still lacking. In this paper, we present an empirical study on stereo matching for large-scale high-resolution satellite images. A new method is studied to solve the problem of huge size and memory requirement when dealing with large-scale high resolution satellite images. Integrating the tiling technique with the well-known dynamic programming and coarse-to-fine pyramid scheme as well as using memory wisely, the suggested method can be utilized for huge stereo satellite images. Analyzing 350 points from an image of size of 8192 x 8192, disparity results attain an acceptable accuracy with RMS error of 0.5459. Taking the trade-off between computational aspect and accuracy, our method gives an efficient stereo matching for huge satellite image files.