Stereo matching algorithm for 3D surface reconstruction based on triangulation principle

This article presents a new stereo matching algorithm based on local method. The absolute difference (AD) algorithm works fast and precise at low texture area, however this algorithm is sensitive to radiometric distortions (i.e., contrast or brightness) and low texture areas. To overcome these problems, the proposed algorithm utilizes a combination of AD, gradient difference (GM) and census transform (CT). The GM algorithm is robust against the radiometric errors and CT algorithm works well on the low texture regions. The proposed algorithm performs much better based on the experimental results of the Middlebury dataset. The disparity map from the result consists of depth information which requires for the three-dimensional (3D) surface reconstruction.