Performance Evaluation of Stereo Reconstruction Algorithms on NIR Images

Abstract: Stereo vision is one of the most active research areas in computer vision. While hundreds of stereo reconstruction algorithms have been developed, little work has been done on the evaluation of such algorithms and almost none on evaluation on Near-Infrared (NIR) images. Of almost a hundred examined, we selected a set of 15 stereo algorithms, mostly with real-time performance, which were then categorized and evaluated on several NIR image datasets, including single stereo pair and stream datasets. The accuracy and run time of each algorithm are measured and compared, giving an insight into which categories of algorithms perform best on NIR images and which algorithms may be candidates for real-time applications. Our comparison indicates that adaptive support-weight and belief propagation algorithms have the highest accuracy of all fast methods, but also longer run times (2-3 seconds). On the other hand, faster algorithms (that achieve 30 or more fps on a single thread) usually perform an order of magnitude worse when measuring the per-centage of incorrectly computed pixels.