Quality preserving depth estimation in sequential stereo images

Computational complexity of the local stereo matching method is affected by disparity ranges. In case of depth estimation in sequential stereo images, high computational complexity is a problem in terms of real-time processing. In this paper, we propose a temporal correlation based stereo matching method in sequential images. Using temporal information in a sequential stereo matching method provides inaccurate disparity ranges, since the estimated depth map accuracy is gradually degraded. To preserve the depth map quality in temporal stereo matching procedure, we adopt the guided image filtering for matching cost aggregation. Since the guided image filtering has a similar structure with bilateral filter, it preserves an object boundary region even in restricted disparity search ranges. Inaccurately estimated disparity values from the temporal correlation are compensated by filtering based cost aggregation method. From the experiment results, we check that the proposed depth map acquisition method preserves the depth map quality in temporal domain stereo matching.