Generation of stereo images for Mastcam imagers

There are two multispectral Mastcam imagers in the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) onboard the Mars rover Curiosity. The left imager has low resolution whereas the right imager is just the opposite. Most of the time, the two imagers work independently. It will be interesting to explore the possibility of fusing the two left and right images to produce stereo images. However, the extremely short baseline of the stereo images challenges the stereo 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we tested the feasibility of using Mastcam images for stereo 3D reconstruction. We took a five-point algorithm to perform the epipolar rectification and then performed a census-based semi-global matching algorithm on the rectified stereo pairs to produce disparity maps. Preliminary tests using Mastcam images of two scenes were performed to test the robustness of the processing pipeline.