The Naked Truth about Cost Functions

Abstract

This paper reports about the performance of various cost functions as common or possible for stereo matching, within a `purist's matching strategy', which does not integrate any further optimization approach such as a continuity term, coarse-to- ne, left/right consistency checks, or others. The performed experiments support a few general conclusions, such as about the relation between 1D- or 2D-window based cost functions, the use of zero-mean normalization, the census cost function, or the use of B-splines for subpixel accurate cost calculation.