Quad 3D Vision Betters Stereo

Open source Elphel camera unveils its 4-way camera device that is said to have higher depth resolution and less prone to artifacts than stereo cameras:

"Common approach for matching image pairs is to replace the two-dimensional correlation with a single-dimensional task by correlating pixels along the epipolar lines that are just horizontal lines for horizontally built binocular systems with the parallel optical axes. Aggregation of the correlation maximums locations between the neighbor parallel lines of pixels is preformed in the image pixels domain after each line is processed separately.

For tile-based processing it is beneficial to perform a full 2-d correlation as the phase correlation is performed in the frequency domain, and after the pointwise multiplication during aberration correction the image tiles are already available in the 2d frequency domain. Two dimensional correlation implies aggregation of data from multiple scan lines, it can tolerate (and be used to correct) small lens misalignments, with appropriate filtering it can be used to detect (and match) linear features."

The new camera is said to achieve 10% depth resolution at 200m distance with 15cm camera base.

Some 3D scene samples from the new camera are shown here.