Linear stereo matching

Recent local stereo matching algorithms based on an adaptive-weight strategy achieve accuracy similar to global approaches. One of the major problems of these algorithms is that they are computationally expensive and this complexity increases proportionally to the window size. This paper proposes a novel cost aggregation step with complexity independent of the window size (i.e. O(1)) that outperforms state-of-the-art O(1) methods. Moreover, compared to other O(1) approaches, our method does not rely on integral histograms enabling aggregation using colour images instead of grayscale ones. Finally, to improve the results of the proposed algorithm a disparity refinement pipeline is also proposed. The overall algorithm produces results comparable to those of state-of-the-art stereo matching algorithms.