Wavelet Transforms for Stereo Imaging

Abstract

Stereo vision is a means of obtaining three-dimensional information by considering the same scene from two different positions. Stereo correspondence has long been and will continue to be the active research topic in computer vision. The requirement of dense disparity map output is great demand motivated by modern applications of stereo such as three-dimensional high-resolution object reconstruction and view synthesis, which require disparity estimates in all image regions.Stereo correspondence algorithms usually require significant computation. The challenges are computational economy, accuracy and robustness. While a large number of algorithms for stereo matching have been developed, there still leaves the space for improvement especially when a new mathematical tool such as wavelet analysis becomes mature.The aim of the thesis is to investigate the stereo matching approach using wavelet transform with a view to producing efficient and dense disparity map outputs. After the shift invariance property of various wavelet transforms is identified, the main contributions of the thesis are made in developing and evaluating two wavelet approaches (the dyadic wavelet transform and complex wavelet transform) for solving the standard correspondence problem. This comprises an analysis of the applicability of dyadic wavelet transform to disparity map computation, the definition of a waveletbased similarity measure for matching, the combination of matching results from different scales based on the detectable minimum disparity at each scale and the application of complex wavelet transform to stereo matching.The matching method using the dyadic wavelet transform is through SSD correlation comparison and is in particular detailed. A new measure using wavelet coefficients is defined for similarity comparison. The approach applying a dual tree of complex wavelet transform to stereo matching is formulated through phase information. A multiscale matching scheme is applied for both the matching methods. Imaging testing has been made with various synthesised and real image pairs.Experimental results with a variety of stereo image pairs exhibit a good agreement with ground truth data, where available, and are qualitatively similar to published results for other stereo matching approaches. Comparative results show that the dyadic wavelet transform-based matching method is superior in most cases to the other approaches considered.<br/