Vaudrey, TobiWedel, AndreasKlette, Reinhard2009-06-162009-06-162009Multimedia Imaging Report 41 (2009)1178-5789http://hdl.handle.net/2292/4356You are granted permission for the non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, BUT this permission is only for a period of 45 (forty-five) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the original MI_tech website http://www.mi.auckland.ac.nz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=127&Itemid=113 . All other rights are reserved by the author(s).Robust stereo and optical flow disparity matching is essential for computer vision applications with varying illumination conditions. Most robust disparity matching algorithms rely on computationally expensive normalized variants of the brightness constancy assumption to compute the matching criterion. In this paper, we reinvestigate the removal of global and large area illumination artifacts, such as vignetting, camera gain, and shading reflections, by directly modifying the input images. We show that this significantly reduces violations of the brightness constancy assumption, while maintaining the information content in the images. In particular, we define metrics and perform a methodical evaluation to firstly identify the loss of information in the images, and secondly determine the reduction of brightness constancy violations. Thirdly, we experimentally validate that modifying the input images yields robustness against illumination artifacts for optical flow disparity matching.Copyright Computer Science Department, The University of Auckland. You are granted permission for the non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, BUT this permission is only for a period of 45 (forty-five) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the original CITR web site under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htmTechnical ReportFields of Research::280000 Information, Computing and Communication Scienceshttp://purl.org/eprint/accessRights/OpenAccess