Application of morphological processing methods in computer stereo vision

Abstract

Computer vision algorithms are important for many areas of human activity. In particular, the number of applications related to the need to process images of real-world objects with computerized tools and the subsequent use of descriptive information in a variety of interactive and automated decision-making systems is increased. An important tool for analyzing real-world scenes are approaches to the application of stereo vision algorithms. The important step of many stereo matching algorithms is a disparity map. Depending on the content of the observed scene, part of the values on the disparity map can be immediately attributed to background values on a certain basis, or form a "natural" background, which is characterized by loss of informative data due to unacceptable error of subsequent resultant distance values. The calculated disparity map of any algorithm may contain some shortcomings in the form of discontinuities of continuous information areas caused by the complexity of shooting conditions, the impact of noise of various natures, hardware imperfections, and so on. An approach to mitigating the undesirable influence of negative factors on the resulting disparity is the use of mathematical morphology operations to process disparity maps at the post-processing stage. This paper presents information technology for increasing the content of disparity maps based on the mathematical morphology methods. The technology is based on a combination of morphological operations of erosion and dilation, which eliminates the typical problems of discontinuities of monotone regions and erroneous values on disparity maps. The proposed approach allows reducing the impact of common problems that arise during the operation of stereo matching algorithms, as well as increase the overall informativeness of disparity maps for images of real objects in the absence of partial or complete initial data on the characteristics of the observed scene.
The results of testing morphological operations with disparity maps for real objects allow us to conclude about the possibility of partial restoration of areas of disparity maps with gaps in continuous information areas, as well as to reduce the impact of random anomalous values on the overall content of the disparity maps.