Stereo Matching With Color and Monochrome Cameras in Low-Light Conditions

Hae-Gon Jeon, Joon-Young Lee, Sunghoon Im, Hyowon Ha, In So Kweon; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 4086-4094

Consumer devices with stereo cameras have become popular because of their low-cost depth sensing capability. However, those systems usually suffer from low imaging quality and inaccurate depth acquisition under low-light conditions. To address the problem, we present a new stereo matching method with a color and monochrome camera pair. We focus on the fundamental trade-off that monochrome cameras have much better light-efficiency than color-filtered cameras. Our key ideas involve compensating for the radiometric difference between two cross-spectral images and taking full advantage of complementary data. Consequently, our method produces both an accurate depth map and high-quality images, which are applicable for various depth-aware image processing. Our method is evaluated using various datasets and the performance of our depth estimation consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.