A new approach using the Viterbi algorithm in stereo correspondence problem

This paper presents an approach that uses the Viterbi algorithm in a stereo correspondence problem. We propose a matching process which is visualized as a trellis diagram to the maximum a posterior result. The matching process is divided into two parts: matching the left scene to the right scene and matching the right scene to the left scene. The result of stereo problem is selected by a comparison between the results of two matching processes. This makes the stereo matching possible without explicitly detecting occlusions. Moreover, this stereo matching algorithm can improve the accuracy of the disparity image, and it has an acceptable running time for practical applications since it uses a trellis diagram iteratively and bi-directionally. The complexity of our proposed method is shown approximately as O(6 × N × P), in which N is the number of disparity, and P is the length of the epipolar line in both the left and right images. Our proposed method has been proved to be robust when applied to several samples of stereo images such as random dot and Tsukuba image. It provides 94.5 percent accuracy for the Tsukuba images.