A new parallel hardware architecture for high-performance stereo matching calculation

•A H/W architecture for real-time stereo matching.•Analysis of the arithmetic characteristic of stereo matching.•Method to reuse the intermediate results.•Method to minimize the calculation load and memory access.•Expandable hardware for 1D and 2D operation.

In this paper, we propose a hardware (H/W) architecture to find disparities for stereo matching in real time. After analyzing the arithmetic characteristic of stereo matching, we propose a new calculating method that reuses the intermediate results to minimize the calculation load and memory access. From this, we propose a stereo matching calculation cell and a new H/W architecture. Finally, we propose a new stereo matching processor. The implemented H/W can operate at the clock frequency of 250 MHz at least in the FPGA (field programmable gate array) environment and produce about 120 disparity images per second for HD stereo images.