Real-time epipolar geometry estimation and disparity

Many visual tasks, such as recognition and visually guided manipulation, benefit from the use of binocular stereo with dynamic vergence. In order to achieve this the epipolar geometry of the two cameras has to be known. In this article we present a system capable of estimating the epipolar geometry of a stereo-head and calculating the binocular disparities in real-time producing dense disparity maps that, for example, can be used for figure-ground segmentation. The number of degrees of freedom has been minimized, without affecting the flexibility of the stereo-head, speeding up the process considerably.