Disparity Estimation by Simultaneous Edge Drawing

This work presents a new low-level real-time algorithm for simultaneous edge drawing and disparity calculation in stereo image pairs. It works by extending the principles from the ED algorithm, a fast and robust edge detector able to produce one pixel-wide chains of pixels for the edges in the image. In this paper the ED algorithm is extended to run simultaneously on both images in a stereo-pair. The disparity information is obtained by matching only a few anchor points and then propagating those disparities along the image edges. This allows the reduction of computational costs compared to other edge-based algorithms, as only a few pixels require to be matched, and avoids the problems present in other edge-point based approaches. The experiments show that this new approach is able to obtain accuracies similar to other state-of-the-art approaches but with a reduced number of computations.