Disparity estimation using Graph cuts for road applications

This paper proposes a new edge based stereo matching approach for road applications. The new approach consists in matching the edge points extracted from the input stereo images using temporal constraints. At the current frame, we propose to estimate a disparity range for each image line based on the disparity map of its preceding one. The stereo images are divided into multiple parts according to the estimated disparity ranges. The optimal solution of each part is independently approximated via the state-of-the-art energy minimization approach Graph cuts. The disparity search space at each image part is very small compared to the global one, which improves the results and reduces the execution time. Furthermore, as a similarity criterion between corresponding edge points, we propose a new cost function based on the intensity, the gradient magnitude and gradient orientation. The proposed method has been tested on virtual stereo images, and it has been compared to a recently proposed method and the results are satisfactory.