Real-Time Plane-Sweeping Stereo with Multiple Sweeping Directions

Recent research has focused on systems for obtaining automatic 3D reconstructions of urban environments from video acquired at street level. These systems record enormous amounts of video; therefore a key component is a stereo matcher which can process this data at speeds comparable to the recording frame rate. Furthermore, urban environments are unique in that they exhibit mostly planar surfaces. These surfaces, which are often imaged at oblique angles, pose a challenge for many window-based stereo matchers which suffer in the presence of slanted surfaces. We present a multi-view plane-sweep-based stereo algorithm which correctly handles slanted surfaces and runs in real-time using the graphics processing unit (GPU). Our algorithm consists of (1) identifying the scene's principle plane orientations, (2) estimating depth by performing a plane-sweep for each direction, (3) combining the results of each sweep. The latter can optionally be performed using graph cuts. Additionally, by incorporating priors on the locations of planes in the scene, we can increase the quality of the reconstruction and reduce computation time, especially for uniform textureless surfaces. We demonstrate our algorithm on a variety of scenes and show the improved accuracy obtained by accounting for slanted surfaces.