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International Workshop on Vision Algorithms

IWVA 1999: Vision Algorithms: Theory and Practice pp 1–19Cite as

An Experimental Comparison of Stereo Algorithms

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1883))

Abstract

While many algorithms for computing stereo correspondence have been proposed, there has been very little work on experimentally evaluating algorithm performance, especially using real (rather than synthetic) imagery. In this paper we propose an experimental comparison of several different stereo algorithms. We use real imagery, and explore two different methodologies, with different strengths and weaknesses. Our first methodology is based upon manual computation of dense ground truth. Here we make use of a two stereo pairs: one of these, from the University of Tsukuba, contains mostly fronto-parallel surfaces; while the other, which we built, is a simple scene with a slanted surface. Our second methodology uses the notion of prediction error, which is the ability of a disparity map to predict an (unseen) third image, taken from a known camera position with respect to the input pair. We present results for both correlation-style stereo algorithms and techniques based on global methods such as energy minimization. Our experiments suggest that the two methodologies give qualitatively consistent results. Source images and additional materials, such as the implementations of various algorithms, are available on the web from http://www.research.microsoft.com/~szeliski/stereo.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, 98052-6399

    Richard Szeliski

  2. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853-7501

    Ramin Zabih

Authors
  1. Richard Szeliski
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  2. Ramin Zabih
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. INRIA Rhône-Alpes, 655 avenue de l’Europe, Montbonnot, 38330, France

    Bill Triggs

  2. Department of Engineering Science, Oxford University, 19 Parks Road, OX1 3PJ, UK

    Andrew Zisserman

  3. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, 98052-6399, USA

    Richard Szeliski

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Szeliski, R., Zabih, R. (2000). An Experimental Comparison of Stereo Algorithms. In: Triggs, B., Zisserman, A., Szeliski, R. (eds) Vision Algorithms: Theory and Practice. IWVA 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1883. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44480-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44480-7_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67973-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44480-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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