A miniature stereo vision machine (MSVM-III) for dense disparity mapping

We have developed a miniature stereo vision machine (MSVM-III) with three cameras for generating high-resolution dense disparity maps at the video rate. The MSVM-III uses only one FPGA chip to compactly compute trinocular rectification, LoG filtering, and area-based matching. The machine, running at 60 MHz, could process more than 30 fps dense disparity maps with 640×480 pixels in 64-pixel disparity search range, and 120 fps with 320×240 pixels. Moreover, the MSVM-III has an IEEE 1394 port to a host at the video rate, an interface port to LCD as a miniature 3D imager, and a user board for controlling small mobile robot or other autonomous systems.