Disparity Map from the Heterogeneous Cameras within Mobile Devices

As the applications using augmented reality have been widespread, the depth information on mobile devices has been important. For example, it can be used for the natural interaction with the environment in augmented reality and the bokeh effects during image processing. However, it is difficult to get depth information on general mobile devices without any depth sensors. As one of the methods for the depth information without any special sensors, stereo vision through recent multiple cameras can be used to generate the disparity map, which can be finally used to generate the depth map. However, the cameras have heterogeneous characteristics each vendor, which makes it challenging to utilize the cameras. In this research, we propose a method for the disparity map to use the cameras that most of the recent devices internally include. With our method, the devices don’t have to include depth sensors such as ToF (Time Of Flight) and SL (Structured Light) and could get the depth information at the raw image from the camera within 275.64 msec (3.63 FPS) on commodity devices. As far as we know, the proposed method is the first research that can generate the disparity map from captured figures by commercial mobile devices.