Trinocular Adaptive Window Size Disparity Estimation Algorithm and Its Real-Time Hardware

This paper proposes a hardware-oriented trinocular adaptive window size disparity estimation (T-AWDE) algorithm and the first real-time trinocular disparity estimation (DE) hardware that targets high-resolution images with high-quality disparity results. The proposed trinocular DE hardware is the enhanced version of the recently published binocular AWDE implementation. The T-AWDE hardware generates a very high quality depth map by merging two depth maps obtained from the center-left and center-right camera pairs. The T-AWDE hardware enhances disparity results by applying a double checking scheme which solves most of the occlusion problems existing in the AWDE implementation while providing correct disparity results even for objects located at left or right edge of the center image. The proposed T-AWDE hardware architecture enables handling 55 frames per second on a Virtex-7 FPGA at a 1024×768 XGA video resolution for a 128 pixels disparity range.