Color stereo vision using hierarchical block matching and active color illumination

Stereo is a well-known technique for obtaining depth information from digital images. Nevertheless, this technique still suffers from a lack in accuracy and/or long computation time needed to match stereo images. A new hierarchical algorithm using an image pyramid for obtaining dense depth maps from color stereo images is presented. We show that matching results of high quality are obtained when using the new hierarchical chromatic block matching algorithm. Most stereo matching algorithms can not compute correct dense depth maps in homogenous image regions. This paper shows that using an active color illumination will considerably improve the quality of the matching results. We present results for synthetic and for real images.