Generation of a disparity panorama using a 3-camera capturing system
This paper presents a method to create a panorama disparity map of a natural environment from stereo images captured by our original multi-purpose 3-camera panorama capturing system which features accurate frame synchronization between 3 channels and can be used outdoors through battery operation. For robust determination of correspondences of a stereo pair, we make use of a census transform, a kind of non-parametric local transform. The census transform summarizes local image structure as a bit string, and gives very good stereo-matching results without such processes as image pyramids, bi-directional search, complicated matching evaluation, and too much edge detection dependent interpolation. To interpolate unknown disparities, we introduced a process influenced by the K-means algorithm. Then, use of 3-channel images and overlapping of the maps give multiple disparity values for one pixel, which enables screening of very confident values. We have obtained very good results on such complex scenes as contain branches and leaves of trees.