Block-matching stereo with relaxed fronto-parallel assumption

In this paper, we present a new scheme for block-matching stereo. The main intention is to relax the inherent assumption that within a block the disparities are constant, because this assumption is often violated. Instead of using the matching cost of one disparity within a matching block, the best matching for several disparities are first selected for each pixel and then these best matches are combined to the final block-matching value. Results on the KITTI benchmark show that this scheme increases the performance of block-matching stereo especially for large matching windows, however, there is also a significant increase for smaller block sizes. Furthermore, we show that a straightforward combination with the appearance-aligned block-matching stereo leads to results that surpass the performance of both single techniques.