Stereo matching of satellite images using the transputer

The transputer provides a powerful new capacity in parallel computing which can readily be optimised for specific applications. The authors compare three alternative decomposition techniques for a large problem on a network of 21 transputers, from the standpoints of speed, hardware efficiency and ease of programming. They have programmed three highly parallel implementations of an algorithm which constitutes part to a real-time system to generate terrain relief maps from satellite stereo image pairs. The particular algorithm used is the stereo matching strategy due to Barnard and Thompson (1980). The algorithm attempts to identify corresponding points in two image frames, in this case raw (non-epipolar) SPOT images, in order to refine initial estimates for the relative orientation parameters of the sensor in the two cases