A stereo matching method for actual binocular system

Nowadays, binocular stereo matching technology has achieved a great progress in theory, but most of the algorithms have good results only for standard image pairs. In the actual binocular systems, the image pair will be different in color, intensity and sharpness because of the inconsistence of illumination, optical defocus, color response of image sensors and so on, which will significantly reduce the stereo matching accuracy or even totally get wrong matching result. To acquire a good disparity map, a new stereo matching method was proposed for actual binocular system in this paper. After acquiring image pair, an automatic method based on Log-space is used to rectify left and right images in order that they are consistent in color, intensity and sharpness. Then the disparity map is obtained from the rectified images by Census algorithm. Experimental results show that our proposed method is more robust to illumination changes and can improve disparity map largely.