A Sub-Pixel Stereo Correspondence Technique Based on 1D Phase-only Correlation

This paper presents a technique for high-accuracy correspondence search between two rectified images using 1D phase-only correlation (POC). The correspondence search between stereo images can be reduced to 1D search through image rectification. However, we usually employ block matching with 2D rectangular image blocks for finding the best matching point in the 1D search. We propose the use of 1D POC (instead of 2D block matching) for stereo correspondence search. The use of 1D POC makes possible significant reduction in computational cost without sacrificing reconstruction accuracy compared with the 2D POC-based approach. Also, the resulting reconstruction accuracy is much higher than those of conventional stereo matching techniques using SAD (sum of absolute differences) and SSD (sum of squared differences) combined with sub-pixel disparity estimation.