Simultaneous Stereo Rectification and Distortion Correction with Application to DoF Synthesis

Abstract

Stereo rectification based on epipolar geometry is an image transformation process which is used to align the rectified stereo images to be coplanar. For image pairs captured by low-cost stereo camera systems, image noises and optical distortions in images may lead to errors in depth estimation. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to simultaneously solve the stereo rectification and distortion correction problems in an integrated optimization framework. The estimated disparity maps are then used to synthesize the depth of field (DoF), which is to increase the saliency of the foreground objects, with the proposed spatially-variant filtering method. Experimental results on various synthetic and real stereo images are shown to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the stereo rectification error by considering the optical distortion model. The DoF synthesis can also be improved by using more accurate disparity estimation results.