• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.9
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• pp.932-945
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• 2017

In this paper, a new hardware and software architecture for a stereo vision processing system including rectification, disparity estimation, and visualization was developed. The developed method, named LArge scale stereo matching method using Support Point Interpolation (LASPI), shows excellence in real-time processing for obtaining dense disparity maps from high quality image regions that contain high density support points. In the real-time processing of high definition (HD) images, LASPI does not degrade the quality level of disparity maps compared to existing stereo-matching methods such as Efficient LArge-scale Stereo matching (ELAS). LASPI has been designed to meet a high frame-rate, accurate distance resolution performance, and a low resource usage even in a limited resource environment. These characteristics enable LASPI to be deployed to safety-critical applications such as an obstacle recognition system and distance detection system for autonomous vehicles. A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for the LASPI algorithm has been implemented in order to support parallel processing and 4-stage pipelining. From various experiments, it was verified that the developed FPGA system (Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA, 148.5MHz Clock) is capable of processing 30 HD ($1280{\times}720pixels$) frames per second in real-time while it generates disparity maps that are applicable to real vehicles.