Cost aggregation with anisotropic diffusion in feature space for hybrid stereo matching

In this paper, we present a cost aggregation using anisotropic diffusion on a feature space for hybrid stereo matching. Stereo matching can be classified into two categories: feature-based and area-based approaches. Feature-based approaches generate accurate but sparse disparity maps. On the other hand, area-based approaches generate dense but unreliable disparity maps, especially at depth discontinuities and homogeneous regions. We hence propose a stereo matching algorithm having advantages of both approaches. We study how to design a correspondence algorithm without modeling any depth cues except disparity. A procedure of depth perception is modeled via anisotropic diffusion on the feature space in terms of coherence. Based on the assumption that similar local feature space has similar disparity, we define the feature space and its similarity and then introduce feature confidences into the proposed model. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art methods.