In stereo depth extraction, two cameras are located a fixed horizontal distance apart, on the same vertical and depth axes. A computer is employed to determine the distance of objects from the plane of the cameras; this task consumes substantial computing resources as each pixel of the final depth image requires two convolution operations.
Imagine sustains 12.1 GOPS for Stereo depth extraction, which allows extraction of 212 frames per second of 320x240, 8-bit grayscale images.
Figure 1 shows the source images from a pair of (simulated) cameras. Figure 2 is the depth map produced by the depth extraction.
Figure 1: Left and right camera images
Figure 2: Resulting depth map
Depth extraction has applications in the extraction of 3-D models of real objects. These models are useful for purposes which require real-time 3-D data, such as tele-presence communications.
