Accurate real-time multi-camera stereo-matching on the GPU for 3D reconstruction

Abstract

Using multi-camera matching techniques for 3d reconstruction there is usually the trade-off between the quality of the computed depth map and the speed of the computations. Whereas high quality matching methods take several seconds to several minutes to compute a depth map for one set of images, real-time methods achieve only low quality results. In this paper we present a multi-camera matching method that runs in real-time and yields high resolution depth maps. Our method is based on a novel multi-level combination of normalized cross correlation, deformed matching windows based on the multi-level depth map information, and sub-pixel precise disparity maps. The whole process is implemented completely on the GPU. With this approach we can process four 0.7 megapixel images in 129 milliseconds to a full resolution 3d depth map. Our technique is tailored for the recognition of non-technical shapes, because our target application is face recognition.