Using geometric constraints for matching disparate stereo views of 3D scenes containing planes

Several vision tasks rely upon the availability of sets of corresponding features among images. This paper presents a method which, given some corresponding features in two stereo images, addresses the problem of matching them with features extracted from a second stereo pair captured from a distant viewpoint. The proposed method is based on the assumption that the viewed scene contains two planar surfaces and exploits geometric constraints that are imposed by the existence of these planes to predict the location of image features in the second stereo pair. The resulting scheme handles point and line features in a unified manner and is capable of successfully matching features extracted from stereo pairs acquired from considerably different viewpoints. Experimental results from a prototype implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.