A Differential Evolution Stereo Matching Method in Digital Image Correlation

摘要

Stereo matching is widely used in three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction, stereo machine vision and digital image correlation. The aim of stereo matching process is to solve the well-known correspondence problem, which tries to match points or features from one image with the same points or features in another image from the same 3D scene. There are two basic ways, correlation-based and feature-based, are used to find the correspondences between two images. The correlation-based way is to determine if one location in one image looks/seems like another in another image, and the feature-based way to find if a subset of features in one image is similar in the another image. In stereo matching, a simple algorithm is to compare small patches between two rectified images by correlation search. For the pair images acquired from two cameras inevitably exists some rotation transformation, the algorithm first runs a preprocessing step to rectify the images with the epipolar rectification to simplify the problem of finding matching points between images. The epipolar rectification is to determine a transformation of each image plane such that pairs of conjugate epipolar lines become collinear and parallel to one of the image axes. It will lead the loss of gray information of images. The effect is dependent on the amount of angle. When the angle is big enough, the correlation search may yield error results because of retrograded correlation effect. In order to solve the problem, the paper presents an improved stereo matching algorithm with differential evolution to solve the correspondence problem.