Real-time stereo vision systems have many applications -
from autonomous navigation for vehicles through surveillance
to materials handling. Accurate scene interpretation
depends on an ability to process high resolution images in
real-time, but, although the calculations for stereo matching
are basically simple, a practical system needs to evaluate
at least 109 disparities every second - beyond the capability
of a single processor. Stereo correspondence algorithms
have high degrees of inherent parallelism and are thus good
candidates for parallel implementations. In this paper, we
compare the performance obtainable with an FPGA and a
GPU to understand the trade-off between the flexibility but
relatively low speed of an FPGA and the high speed and
fixed architecture of the GPU. Our comparison highlights
the relative strengths and limitations of the two systems.
Our experiments show that, for a range of image sizes, the
GPU manages 2 × 109 disparities per second, compared
with 2.6 × 109 disparities per second for an FPGA