FPGA based stereo vision system to display disparity map in realtime

Dense stereo disparity map displayed in real time as video is one form of 3D video that renders objects in the scene by the intensity modulation in terms of the distance to the objects. With two cameras whose the optical axes are parallel, the stereo disparity is calculated to find the range to the objects. Sophisticated matching algorithms are generally slow and difficult to apply parallelism to run in real time at a video rate. In order to realize a real time system, the window based stereo matching algorithm that searches the minimum of the sum of absolute differences along the raster scanlines was implemented in the Altera Cyclone II EP2C35F672C6 FPGA. The developed HDL code successfully achieved DDM dynamically displaying the measure of distance, dense disparity map in VGA format at 15 fps. © 2012 IEEE.