Uncalibrated stereo rectification for automatic 3D surveillance

We describe a stereo rectification method suitable for automatic 3D surveillance. We take advantage of the fact that in a typical urban scene, there is ordinarily a small number of dominant planes. Given two views of the scene, we align a dominant plane in one view with the other. Conjugate epipolar lines between the reference view and plane-aligned image become geometrically identical and can be added to the rectified image pair line by line. Selecting conjugate epipolar lines to cover the whole image is simplified since they are geometrically identical. In addition, the polarities of conjugate epipolar lines are automatically preserved by plane alignment, which simplifies stereo matching.