Dense Matching With Optimized Penalty and Interpolation for High-Resolution Optical Stereo Image Pairs

High-resolution optical satellite stereo image pairs have been a challenge for dense matching due to their characteristics, such as long baseline and significant occlusion. This letter proposes a semiglobal matching with optimized penalty and interpolation (OPI-SGM), which includes the segmental adaptive adjustment (SAA) for the penalty term and the dual-path interpolation (DPI) for invalid regions. We introduce
$\gamma $
as the maximum absolute gray value difference between pixels in the same plane and combine it with the logarithmic function to make SAA less sensitive to penalty adjustment in the aggregation function. DPI uses two paths to improve interpolation reliability and uses
$\gamma $
as a threshold to filter weighted valid disparities, reducing the number of erroneous disparities near dense building areas. Experimental results show that OPI-SGM outperforms other SGM variants. When processing new data, it produces more accurate disparity maps than two end-to-end matching networks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.