Complex correspondences in straight line stereo matching

Partial occlusion and fragmented lines will result in the various cases of straight line correspondences, such as one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many ones. However, the complex correspondences, such as one-to-many and many-to-many ones, are usually ignored or cannot be established completely in the existing methods. Here, the essence of the complex correspondences will be analyzed. Based on the two characteristics of a straight line, which are introduced by regarding a straight line as a set of collinear points, the compatibility between the complex correspondences and the uniqueness constraint of point correspondence is proved and a new uniqueness constraint of correspondence for matching lines is proposed. Based on the analysis of the complex correspondences, a new concept of line feature group is defined to describe a set of integral correspondences among straight line features from different images and then a new algorithm for establishing all the correspondences completely is described simply. The experimental results with real stereo images illustrate that the complex correspondences among straight lines are actual cases and can be established effectively.