Stereo by incremental matching of contours

Contours made of sequences of adjacent edge points are used as primitives in stereo pair matching. Matching contour segments, rather than the traditional epipolar edge points, can greatly reduce possible ambiguity. This is done by reformulating point-matching constraints to apply to contour matching, and by introducing a unique incremental matching scheme. Best-matched contours are paired first, constraining through neighborhood support their neighboring contours. Examples of the proposed stereo matching scheme are shown, with very few errors, for aerial images of natural terrain