Effective Combination of Vertical and Horizontal Stereo Vision

In this paper, we propose to complement a horizontally aligned stereo rig with a vertically aligned one. Based on artificial and real camera images we show that certain image structures can be detected by only one of the setups. Actually, the depth of structures with significant gradients in just one direction can only be measured using cameras with an offset in the same direction. Thus, the joint usage of both setups allows for significantly increased robustness and reliability. Moreover, we propose an approach for the fusion of two disparity images gained from two stereo camera pairs with one common camera. The algorithm uses an approximation of the actually measured matching cost function. Thus it takes into account the present image structures and the capabilities of each particular stereo setup. Due to its mathematical simplicity, it can be computed within 1 ms for images with a size of 1164 × 335 pixel. The performance of the fusion is demonstrated using different real-world scenarios.