Hierarchical stereo matching using feature extraction of an image

In this paper a hierarchical stereo matching algorithm based on feature extraction is proposed. The boundary (edge) as feature point in an image is first obtained by segmenting an image into red, green, blue and white regions. With the obtained boundary information, disparities are extracted by matching window on the image boundary, and the initial disparity map is generated when assigned the same disparity to neighbor pixels. The final disparity map is created with the initial disparity. The regions with the same initial disparity are classified into the regions with the same color and we search the disparity again in each region with the same color by changing block size and search range. The experiment results are evaluated on the Middlebury data set and it show that the proposed algorithm performed better than a phase based algorithm in the sense that only about 14% of the disparities for the entire image are inaccurate in the final disparity map. Furthermore, it was verified that the boundary of each region with the same disparity was clearly distinguished.