Virtual support window for adaptive-weight stereo matching

It attracts many researchers´ attention to find a stereo matching algorithm both accurate and fast. Yoon and Kweon´s Adaptive Support-Weight(ASW) method is supposed to be a very successful algorithm in both accuracy and speed. However, it is very time consuming for ASW to take a large number of pixels into consideration for computing a disparity. In this paper, we present a stereo matching algorithm based on the ASW method to solve this problem. We introduce a time efficient technique, partial sum, to reduce the information of pixels in a large window into a small one so that disparities can be computed using the large window of pixels with low time complexity. Our method can obtain better representation of local properties of a pixel than the ASW method. Experimental results show that our method produces more accurate disparity maps than ASW method.