Efficient determination of disparity map from stereo images with modified sum of absolute differences (SAD) algorithm

This paper proposes modification of the conventional Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD) for performance improvement in depth-map estimation from stereo images captured by a camera in a stereo system. The conventional SAD is commonly search in whole stereo images to find out the difference in pixels between the left and right captured images, and then obtains the corresponding disparity map and this may lead to high elapsing time. In order to reduce the number of searching pixels, the proposed modified SAD tries to estimate the difference only from edge pixels which are referred as pixels-of-interest and bring significant information about depth map. The number of pixels being searched is reduced to about 17% on the total pixels, hence the total elapsing time is saved up to around 89% compared to that of the conventional SAD. This results is promising for implementation of a real-time vision system.