A versatile stereo implementation on commodity graphics hardware

This paper presents a detailed description of a real-time correlation-based stereo algorithm running completely on the graphics processing unit (GPU). This is important since it allows to free up the main processor for other tasks including high-level interpretation of the stereo results. We first introduce a two-view stereo algorithm that includes some advanced features such as adaptive windows and cross-checking. Then we extend it using a plane-sweep approach to allow multiple frames without rectification.

By taking advantage of advanced features of recent GPUs the proposed algorithm runs in real-time. Our implementation running on an ATI Radeon 9800 graphics card achieves up to 289 million disparity evaluations per second including all the overhead to download images and read-back the disparity map, which is several times faster than commercially available CPU-based implementations.