Memory-efficient belief propagation in stereo matching on GPU

Belief propagation (BP) is a commonly used global energy minimization algorithm for solving stereo matching problem in 3D reconstruction. However, it requires large memory bandwidth and data size. In this paper, we propose a novel memory-efficient algorithm of BP in stereo matching on the Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The data size and transfer bandwidth are significantly reduced by storing only a part of the whole message. In order to maintain the accuracy of the matching result, the local messages are reconstructed using shared memory available in GPU. Experimental result shows that there is almost an order of reduction in the global memory consumption, and 21 to 46% saving in memory bandwidth when compared to the conventional algorithm. The implementation result on a recent GPU shows that we can obtain 22.8 times speedup in execution time compared to the execution on CPU.