Efficient cost volume sampling for plane sweeping based multiview depth estimation

Plane sweeping is an increasingly popular algorithm for generating depth estimates from multiview images. It avoids image rectification, and can align the matching process with slanted surfaces, improving accuracy and robustness. However, the size of the search space increases significantly when different surface orientations are considered. We present an efficient way to perform plane sweeping without individually computing reprojection and similarity metrics on image pixels for all cameras, all orientations and all distances. The procedure truly excels when the amount of views is increased and scales efficiently with the number of different plane orientations. It relies on approximation to generate the costs, but the differences are shown to be small. In practice, it provides results equivalent to conventional matching but faster, making it suitable for applying in many existing implementations.