Quaternion wavelet phase based stereo matching for uncalibrated images

This paper proposes a quaternion wavelet phase based stereo matching (QWPSM) scheme for uncalibrated image pairs. In this scheme. we estimate the disparity by directly establishing correspondences between quaternionic phase structures of two quaternion wavelet filtered (QWF) images. Firstly, linear-phase quaternion wavelet filters (LPQWFs) are constructed from real biorthogonal wavelet bases. Then, quaternion phases are extracted under each scale through quaternion wavelet filtering of the multiscale transformed image pyramids. The disparity estimation is formed as a minimization process of a local energy weighted cost function, and propagated from coarse to fine scales. Costs can adaptively alleviate the negative effects of phase singularities, which are the main causes of mismatches in phase-based stereo matching. Multiscale matching strategy is used to avoid phase wrapping and improve convergence speed. Experimental results are promising in various image pairs. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.