Characterisation of a FPGA-based multi-view stereo system with linear measuring arrangement

In recent years, stereoscopic image processing algorithms have gained importance for a variety of applications. To capture larger measurement volumes, multiple stereo systems are combined into a multi-view stereo system (MVS). To reduce the amount of data and the data rate, calculation steps close to the sensors are outsourced to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as upstream computing units. In this paper a FPGA-based MVS system with linear camera arrangement and part overlapping field of view is presented. The system consists of four FPGA-based passive stereoscopic systems and a downstream processing unit (Zynq Ultrascale ZU9EG SoC). This synchronizes the pre-processing modules and receives the disparity maps via HDMI. A subsequent computing unit calculates a coherent 3d point cloud. Basic investigation of the system is shown to use this system for road damage detection in the future.