Prediction of stereo disparity using optical flow

Abstract

This paper describes a scheme in which optical flow information is used to guide stereo correspondence matching. The epipolar constraint, which is used in static stereo to confine correspondence search to a line, is replaced by a mechanism which confines search to an area around a point. The experimental setup consists of a pair of cameras mounted on a mobile robot vehicle. A sequence of stereo image pairs is taken during vehicle motion, and the images are processed by a corner detector. One of the first steps in extracting useful information from the corners is to solve the correspondence problem. For a stereo sequence, this requires both the temporal matching of corners along the sequence, and also the stereo matching of corners between left and right images. The results of