A fast wavelet-based depth estimation algorithm for arbitrary stereo configuration

In this paper, a fast depth estimation method using arbitrary configured stereo vision is proposed. The key idea of the method is to use wavelet transform modulus maxima as feature points in the process of epipolar line rectification and image pair matching. Wavelet transform modulus maxima are first extracted for the image pair at coarse scale. Then stereo rectification process is implemented only on these maxima. After that, the stereo matching is calculated based on the extracted modulus maxima. These steps are iterated at finer scales, where the searching intervals of the stereo matching points are limited to the neighborhood of the matches at former scale. At last, as a optional step, the dense disparity map can be produced by traditional method using the former obtained sparse disparity map information. Experiment on the corridor image pair proves the validity of the method.