Region based stereo matching method with gradient and distance information

Stereo matching methods estimate depth information of captured images. One way to estimate accurate depth values is to use the distance information. This method enhances the disparity map by preserving the edge region. In order to preserve the depth discontinuity near the edge region, it uses the distance information as a new weighting value for the matching cost function. However, this method has a high complexity problem. To overcome this problem, we propose region based stereo matching method with gradient and distance information. Since the distance transform calculates the pixel distance from the edge region, we can classify whether the pixel is near the edge region or not. In other words, some regions near the edge have small distance transformed values. For this reason, our method divides regions depending on the value of distance transformed pixel. After that, different cost functions are applied to each region for improving the computation efficiency.