Binocular versus trinocular stereo

Consideration is given to the twin issues of the gain in accuracy of stereo correspondence and the accompanying increase in computational cost due to the use of a third camera for stereo analysis. The relative performance of binocular and trinocular stereo algorithms on stereo images with known ground truth is evaluated. A technology for comparing the matching performance of stereo algorithms by using real digital elevation maps is developed. Trinocular local matching reduces the percentage of mismatches having large disparity errors by more than one half when compared to binocular matching, while trinocular stereopsis increases the computational cost of local matching over binocular stereopsis by only about one fourth