Segment-tree based cost aggregation for stereo matching with enhanced segmentation advantage

Segment-tree (ST) based cost aggregation algorithm for stereo matching successfully integrates the information of segmentation with non-local cost aggregation framework. The tree structure which is generated by the segmentation strategy directly determines the final results for this kind of algorithms. However, the original strategy performs unreasonable due to its coarse performance and ignores to meet the disparity consistency assumption. To improve these weaknesses we propose a novel segmentation algorithm for constructing a more faithful ST with enhanced segmentation advantage according to a robust initial over-segmentation. Then we implement non-local cost aggregation framework on this new ST structure and obtain improved disparity maps. Performance evaluations on all 31 Middlebury stereo pairs show that the proposed algorithm outperforms than other five state-of-the-art aggregated based algorithms and also keeps time efficiency.