A Computer Implementation of a Theory of Human Stereo Vision

Abstract

Recently, Marr and Poggio (1979) presented a theory of human stereo vision. An implementation of that theory is presented and consists of five steps: (1) The left and right images are each filtered with masks of four sizes that increase with eccentricity; the shape of these masks is given by $ abla^{2}G$, the laplacian of a gaussian function. (2) Zero-crossing in the filtered images are found along horizontal scan lines. (3) For each mask size, matching takes place between zero-crossings of the same sign and roughly the same orientation in the two images, for a range of disparities up to about the width of the mask's central region. Within this disparity range, Marr and Poggio showed that false targets pose only a simple problem. (4) The output of the wide masks can control vergence movements, thus causing small masks to come into low resolution to dealing with small disparities at a high resolution. (5) When a correspondence is achieved, it is stored in a dynamic buffer, called the 2 1/2 dimensional sketch. To support the sufficiency of the Marr-Poggio model of human stereo vision, the implementation was tested on a wide range of stereograms from the human stereopsis literature. The performance of the implementation is illustrated and compared with human perception. As well, statistical assumptions made by Marr and Poggio are supported by comparison with statistics found in practice. Finally, the process of implementing the theory has led to the clarification and refinement of a number of details within the theory; these are discussed in detail.