Enhancement of Stereo Feature Matching using Feature Windows and Feature Links

This paper presents a new stereo matching technique which is based on the matching of feature windows and feature links. The proposed method uses the FAST feature detector to find image features in stereo images and determines the correspondences of the detected features in the stereo images. We define a feature window which is an image region containing several image features. The proposed technique consists of two matching steps. First, a feature window is defined in a standard image and its correspondence is found in a reference image. Second, the corresponding features between the matched windows are determined by using the feature link technique. If there is no correspondence for an image feature in the standard image, it`s disparity is interpolated by neighboring feature sets. We evaluate the accuracy of the proposed technique by comparing our results with the ground truth of in a stereo image database. We also compare the matching accuracy and computation time with two conventional feature-based stereo matching techniques.