Local stereo matching using geodesic support weights

Local stereo matching has recently experienced large progress by the introduction of new support aggregation schemes. These approaches estimate a pixel´s support region via color segmentation. Our contribution lies in an improved method for accomplishing this segmentation. Inside a square support window, we compute the geodesic distance from all pixels to the window´s center pixel. Pixels of low geodesic distance are given high support weights and therefore large influence in the matching process. In contrast to previous work, we enforce connectivity by using the geodesic distance transform. For obtaining a high support weight, a pixel must have a path to the center point along which the color does not change significantly. This connectivity property leads to improved segmentation results and consequently to improved disparity maps. The success of our geodesic approach is demonstrated on the Middlebury images. According to the Middlebury benchmark, the proposed algorithm is the top performer among local stereo methods at the current state-of-the-art.