Distance measuring using calibrating subpixel distances of stereo pixel pairs in artificial compound eye

The electronic cluster eye (eCley) is a new artificial compound eye with some prominent properties of high resolution, miniature volume, and large field of view. Although having the potential capability of obtaining the depth information, the limitation of the short focal length and tiny volume of the eCley still confine the conventional stereo matching algorithms to determine the distances of objects. In this paper, a new method of measuring the subpixel distances of stereo pixel pairs for the eCley is introduced to implement the function of perceiving the depth information. According to the property of the intensity transitional area, the proposed algorithm employs the corrected coefficients to eliminate the deviation of lightness, identifies the transitional area between the objects and background, fits the edge intensity distribution with the Sigmoid function, and derives the optimal subpixel distances of pixel pairs. The detailed experiments and analysis further demonstrate the effectivity of this method. In the real application the method achieves the accuracy of 90% and satisfies real demands.