A local stereo matching algorithm based on weighted guided image filtering for improving the generation of depth range images

Stereo matching is a challenging problem and highly accurate depth image is important in different applications. The main problem is to estimate the correspondence between two pixels in a stereo pair. To solve this problem, in the last decade, several cost aggregation methods aimed at improving the quality of stereo matching algorithms have been introduced. We propose a new cost aggregation method based on weighted guided image filtering (WGIF) for local stereo matching. The proposed algorithm solves multi-label problems in three steps. First, the cost volume is constructed using pixel-wise matching cost computation functions. Then, each slice of the cost volume is independently filtered using the WGIF, which substitutes for the smoothness term in the energy function. Finally, the disparity of any pixel is simply computed. The WGIF uses local weights based on a variance window of pixels in a guidance image for cost volume filtering. Experimental results using Middlebury stereo benchmark verify that the proposed method is effective due to a high quality cost volume filter.