Edge-preserving guided filtering based cost aggregation for stereo matching

• An edge-preserving guided filter based stereo matching algorithm with adaptive support window is proposed.
• The combined cost measurement has good performance and robustness against radiometric differences.
• The edge-preserving filters based cost aggregation outperform other filter-based methods in stereo matching.

Stereo matching has been widely used in various computer applications and it is still a challenging problem. In stereo matching, the filter-based stereo matching methods have achieved outstanding performance. A local stereo matching method based on adaptive edge-preserving guided filter is presented in this paper, which can achieve proper cost-volume filtering and keep edges well. We introduce a gradient vector of the enhanced image generated by the proposed filter into the cost computation and the Census transform is adopted in the cost measurement. This cost computation method is robust against radiometric variations and textureless areas. The edge-preserving guided filter approach is proposed to aggregate the cost volume, which further proves the effectiveness of edge-preserving filter for stereo matching. The experiments conducted on Middlebury benchmark and KITTI benchmark demonstrate that the proposed algorithm produces better results compared with other edge-aware filter-based methods.