Accurate Dense Stereo Reconstruction using Graphics Hardware

Abstract

Vertex programs and pixel shaders found in modern graphics hardware are commonly used to enhance the realism of rendered scenes. Recently these hardware facilities were exploited to obtain interactive non-photorealistic effects and to perform low-level image processing tasks like texture filtering for volume visualization. We exploit modern graphics hardware to accomplish the higher level vision task of dense stereo reconstruction. In our system almost every stage of the matching procedure is executed on 3D graphics hardware, therefore utilizing the parallel vertex and pixel pipelines. Our implementation performs accurate calculations and does not suffer from the limited precision of color channels. On state of the art PC hardware our algorithm requires less than one second to reconstruct a dense mesh with subpixel accuracy for input images with one megapixel resolution.