Belief Propagation stereo matching compared to iSGM on binocular or trinocular video data

The report about the ECCV 2012 Robust Vision Challenge summarized strengths and weaknesses of the winning stereo matcher (Iterative Semi-Global Matching = iSGM). In this paper we discuss whether two variants of a Belief Propagation (BP) matcher can cope better with events such as sun flare or missing temporal consistency, where iSGM showed weaknesses (similar to the original SGM). The two variants are defined by the use of a census data cost function on a 5 × 5 window and either a linear or a quadratic truncated smoothness function. An evaluation on data with ground truth showed better results for the linear smoothness function. The BP matcher with the linear smoothness function provided then also better matching results (compared to iSGM) on some of the test sequences (e.g. images with sun flare). The third-eye approach was used for the performance evaluation.