Towards Real-Time Stereo Employing Parallel Algorithms For Edge-Based And Dense Stereo Matching

Only few problems in computer vision have been investigated more vigorously than stereo. Nevertheless, the main obstacle on the way to their practical application is the excessively long computation time needed to match stereo images. This paper presents parallel algorithms for edge-based stereo suitable for depth computation. Edge-based stereo techniques produce only sparse depth maps. Thus, we present in addition an efficient parallel algorithm for dense stereo matching that can be employed in scene reconstruction. Both approaches are implemented on several different computers to measure the performance. We compared single processor and multiple processor implementations to evaluate the profit of parallel realizations. Results are presented in this paper. We show that both approaches are very suitable for parallel implementations and that computing time can be considerably reduced with parallel implementations. Furthermore, we present the results that are obtained when employing the ..