Why Stereo Vision is Not Always About 3D Reconstruction

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that the goal of stereovision is computing explicit 3D scene reconstructions. We show that very accurate camera calibration is needed to support this, and that such accurate calibration is difficult to achieve and maintain. We argue that for tasks like recognition, figure/ground separation is more important than 3D depth reconstruction, and demonstrate a stereo algorithm that supports figure/ground separation without 3D reconstruction.