Fast artificial bee colony and its application to stereo correspondence

• A novel optimisation method.
• Apply to stereo matching.
• Outperform the current methods.

Nature-inspired meta-heuristics have gained popularity for solutions to many real-world complex problems, and the artificial bee colony algorithm is one of the most powerful optimisation methods among meta-heuristics. However, inefficient exploitation of onlooker bees prevents the artificial bee colony algorithm from finding the final result accurately and efficiently for complex problems. In this paper, a novel optimisation method is proposed based on the artificial bee colony algorithm. The proposed optimisation method adaptively exploits onlooker bees over generations. In addition, the proposed optimisation method is applied to a stereo-matching problem to minimise the segment-based integer energy function, which is also introduced in this paper. The experimental results show that the proposed optimisation method outperforms state-of-the-art population-based meta-heuristics, such as the genetic algorithm, differential evolution, conventional artificial bee colony, and clonal selection algorithm, for benchmark functions as well as for the stereo-matching problem.