STEREO IMAGE PROCESSING APPARATUS AND STEREO IMAGE PROCESSING METHOD

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To reduce processing load for calculating parallax of an object in a stereo image.SOLUTION: Left and right images captured by a left camera 110 and a right camera 120 are stored in a left image memory 130 and a right image memory 140. A left-image block setting part 150 and a right-image block setting part 160 receive image data (image processing block) of maximum size for block matching. A left-image block masking part 170 and a right-image block masking part 180 mask the image processing block to define effective image regions. A matching part 210 evaluates similarity between the left and right effective image regions. The left-image block masking part 170 and the right-image block masking part 180 gradually reduce mask amount according to the progress of block matching, or gradually increase the effective image regions. A parallax calculation part 230 calculates parallax from an evaluation result of the effective image regions.