Towards Real-time Trinocular Stereo

Charles D. Hansen, Nicholas Ayache, Francis Lustman

Abstract: We present recent advancements in our passive trinocular stereo system. These include a technique for calibrating and rectifying in a very eficient and simple manner the triplets of images taken for trinocular stereovision systerns. After the rectification of images, epipolar lines are parallel to the axes of the image coordinate frames. Therefore, potential matches between the three images satisfy simpler relations, allowing for a less complicated and more efficient matching algorithm. We also describe a more robust and general control strategy now employed in our trinocular stereo system. We have also developed an innovative method for the reconstruction of 3-D seginents which provides better results and a new validation technique based on the observation that neighbors in the image should be neighbors in space. Experiments are presented demonstrating these advancements. 2 Rectification of the images