Robust uncalibrated stereo rectification with constrained geometric distortions (USR-CGD)

A novel algorithm for uncalibrated stereo image-pair rectification under the constraint of geometric distortion, called USR-CGD, is presented in this work. Although it is straightforward to define a rectifying transformation (or homography) given the epipolar geometry, many existing algorithms have unwanted geometric distortions as a side effect. To obtain rectified images with reduced geometric distortions while maintaining a small rectification error, we parameterize the homography by considering the influence of various kinds of geometric distortions. Next, we define several geometric measures and incorporate them into a new cost function as regularization terms for parameter optimization. Finally, we propose a constrained adaptive optimization scheme to allow a balanced performance between the rectification error and the geometric error. Extensive experimental results are provided to demonstrate the superb performance of the proposed USR-CGD method, which outperforms existing algorithms by a significant margin.