A real-time global stereo-matching on FPGA

An improved global stereo matching algorithm is implemented on a single FPGA for real-time applications. Stereo matching is widely used in stereo vision systems, i.e. objects detection and autonomous vehicles. Global algorithms have much more accurate results than local algorithms, but global algorithms are not implemented on FPGA since they rely over high-end hardware resources. In this implementation the stereo pairs are divided into blocks, the hardware resources are reduced by processing one block once. The hardware implementation is based on a Xilinx Kintex 7 FPGA. Experiment results show that the proposed implementation has an accurate result for the Middlebury benchmarks and 30 frames per second (fps) @1920 × 1680 is achieved.