Electronically directed "focal" stereo

A key to developing computationally efficient stereo vision is the incorporation of intelligent control. Stereo is most effective when it is able to "focus" its analysis on regions and details of a scene that are important to the task at hand, while avoiding less important regions and unnecessary detail. The paper describes two methods for electronically "focusing" stereo measurement through simple image pre-processing. The first allows measurement sensitivity to be adjusted. The second allows the shape of the 3D region in which measurements are gathered to be matched to the shape of surfaces in the scene.< >