Design of a Realtime Stereo Vision System using Adaptive Support-weight

Abstract

The stereo system based on local matching is very popular due to its algorithmic simplicity, however it is limited to apply to various applications because it shows poor quality with low matching rates. In this paper, we propose and design a realtime stereo system based on an adaptive support-weight and the system shows low error rates and realtime performance. Generally, in the adaptive support-weight algorithm the intermediate computing results can not be reused to reduce the number of computations. In this research we modify the scheduling to reuse the intermediate results for the better performance by processing rows and columns separately. The nonlinear functions such as exponential or arc tangent have been designed with piecewise linear and step functions by empirical simulations and error analysis. The proposed architecture is composed of 9 processing elements for realtime performance. The proposed stereo system has been designed and synthesized using Donbu Hitek 0.18um standard cell library and can run up to 350Mhz operation frequency (33 frames per second) with 424K gates.