Uniform Subdivision of Omnidirectional Camera Space for Efficient Spherical Stereo Matching

Omnidirectional cameras have been used widely to better understand surrounding environments. They are often configured as stereo to estimate depth. However, due to the optics of the fisheye lens, conventional epipolar geometry is inapplicable directly to omnidirectional camera images. Intermediate formats of omnidirectional images, such as equirectangular images, have been used. However, stereo matching performance on these image formats has been lower than the conventional stereo due to severe image distortion near pole regions. In this paper, to address the distortion problem of omnidirectional images, we devise a novel subdivision scheme of a spherical geodesic grid. This enables more isotropic patch sampling of spherical image information in the omnidirectional camera space. Our spherical geodesic grid is tessellated with an equal-arc subdivision, making the cell sizes and in-between distances as uniform as possible, i.e., the arc length of the spherical grid cell's edges is well regularized. Also, our uniformly tessellated coordinates in a 2D image can be transformed into spherical coordinates via one-to-one mapping, allowing for analytical forward/backward transformation. Our uniform tessellation scheme achieves a higher accuracy of stereo matching than the traditional cylindrical and cubemap-based approaches, reducing the memory footage required for stereo matching by 20 %.