Simulation and real-time visualization of changing baseline in a stereo pair

The benefits of photogrammetry from low baseline stereo pairs have been increasingly demonstrated in recent years by engineers at the French Space Agency (CNES) and their collaborators, thanks to new advances in image restoration and computer vision. Such an emerging technology requires new tools for generating test data, evaluating and visualizing results. This article discusses the mathematical, numerical and computational problems involved in simulating such low baseline stereo pairs with sufficient accuracy, as well as in the inverse scenario, where the disparity map computed from a low-baseline stereo pair has to be expanded to generate a large baseline stereo pair that makes visual evaluation of the result by photogrametric experts easier. The trade-offs that have to be made in order to obtain accurate results on very large images, with tight constraints on computer resources are also discussed.