Real-time dense stereo on a personal computer

This paper presents a stereo algorithm that enables real time dense disparity measurements on standard personal computers. Unlike many other dense stereo algorithms, which are based on two matching phases, the proposed algorithm relies on a single matching phase and allows for rejecting unreliable matches by exploiting violations of the uniqueness constraint and analysing the behaviour of the correlation scores. The overall algorithm has been carefully optimised using very efficient calculation schemes and deploying massively the SIMD parallel processing capabilities available nowadays in state-of-the-art general purpose microprocessors. The paper describes the algorithm and the optimisation strategies, and provides experimental results obtained on stereo pairs with ground-truth as well as execution times measurements