Introduction

The PMF Stereo Tool provides an interactive facility for performing stereo processing. It is designed to be used in conjunction with the Edge Geom and Stereo management tools to explore various edge based stereo matching strategies. This tool is an alternative to to the area based Correlation Stereo Tool. As a prerequisite the user should perform edge detection and rectification in the Edge geom Tool, the PMF Stereo Tool can then be used to complete the generation of 3D geometry. The user has the choice of either following the Default processing sequence or taking control of the various matching constraints. Manual matching will not be as fast as using the standard routines because these versions of the algorithm are not optimised. In particular use is not made of the "blocked" memory allocation facilities available in Tina (see Programmers Guide).

Essentially there are four stages to stereo matching.

• Form stereo index.
• Build match and match support structures.
• Compute match support scores for each match.
• Select strongest matches.

In addition disparity histogramming can be used to initialise local match ranges from the distribution of all possible matches.

Within stages 3 and 4 it is possible to one of a number of different modules. More than one support module can be used but only a single selection. After selection, alternative matches are no longer available and it is necessary to reset the matches and recompute support if an alternative stereo selection is required.