Development of a Video-Rate Stereo Machine - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Development of a Video-Rate Stereo Machine

Takeo Kanade, Hiroshi Kano, Shigeru Kimura, Eiji Kawamura, Atsushi Yoshida, and Kazuo Oda
Journal Article, Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 261 - 267, March, 1997

Abstract

A video-rate stereo machine has been developed at Carnegie Mellon University with the capability of generating a dense range map, aligned with an intensity image, at the video rate. The target performance of the CMU videorate stereo machine is: 1) multi image input of 6 cameras; 2) high throughput of 30 million point×disparity measurment per second; 3) high frame rate of 30 [frame/sec] ; 4) a dense depth map of 240×256; 5) disparity search range of up to 60 [pixel] ; 6) high precision of up to 8 [bits] (with interpolation) ; 7) uncertainty estimation available for each pixel. The stereo machine is based on a multi-baseline stereo method. The basic theory requires some extensions to allow for parallel, low-cost, high-speed machine implementation. The three major ones are: 1) the use of small integers for image data representation: 2) the use of absolute values instead of squares in the SSD computation (SAD instead of SSD) ; and 3) camera geometry compensation capability for precise camera alignment. The stereo machine successfully generates disparity map of 200×200 with 23 steps of disparity search range in the video rate.

Notes
in Japanese

BibTeX

@article{Kanade-1997-14325,
author = {Takeo Kanade and Hiroshi Kano and Shigeru Kimura and Eiji Kawamura and Atsushi Yoshida and Kazuo Oda},
title = {Development of a Video-Rate Stereo Machine},
journal = {Journal of the Robotics Society of Japan},
year = {1997},
month = {March},
volume = {15},
number = {2},
pages = {261 - 267},
}