Consistent stereo matching under varying radiometric conditions

A consistent stereo matching (CSM) algorithm under varying radiometric conditions, such as lighting and exposure variations, for intermediate view synthesis is proposed in this work. First, we transform the colors of stereo images adaptively so that they are similar at corresponding pixels. Since the correspondences are generally unknown before stereo matching, we estimate pseudo-disparity vectors by sorting pixels based on the cumulative color histograms and use those pseudo vectors in the color transform. Then, to improve the accuracy of stereo matching, we jointly estimate the disparity maps for virtual intermediate views as well as those for real views, based on the consistency criterion that an object point should have the same disparity through all the views. Specifically, we compute matching costs using the reliability term and aggregate the costs to obtain initial disparity maps. We then refine the initial disparity maps by minimizing an energy function, which includes the consistency term. Experimental results show that the proposed CSM algorithm significantly reduces the error rate of disparity estimation under different radiometric conditions and synthesizes high quality intermediate views.