Fast stereo matching for the VIDET system using a general purpose processor with multimedia extensions

The ever-increasing speed of current general purpose processors, together with architectural enhancements such as multimedia-oriented instruction set extensions, allow for deploying standard PC-based systems in a number of computationally intensive computer vision tasks. This paper describes the PC-based real-time stereo vision system developed within the VIDET project, which is a research project aimed at the development of a mobility aid for the visually impaired. VIDET's approach consists in the conversion of depth data gathered through a stereo vision system into a 3D model perceivable by the user by means of a wire-actuated haptic interface. The developed stereo matching algorithm makes massive use of recursion and multimedia instructions to achieve the performance figures needed to sustain user's real-time interaction with the 3D model through the haptic interface.