An infrared salient object stereo matching algorithm based on epipolar rectification

Due to the higher noise and less details in infrared images, general matching algorithms are prone to obtaining unsatisfying results. Combining the idea of salient object, we propose a novel infrared stereo matching algorithm which applies to unconstrained stereo rigs. Firstly, we present an epipolar rectification method introducing particle swarm optimization and K-nearest neighbor to deal with the problem of epipolar constraint. Then we make use of transition region to extract salient object in the rectified infrared image pairs. Finally, disparity map is generated by matching salient regions. Experiments show that our algorithm deals with the infrared stereo matching of unconstrained stereo rigs with better accuracy and higher speed.