A New Stereo Reconstruction Software for STC/SIMBIOSYS on BepiColombo

A new stereo-matching algorithm is proposed that uses snakes in order to find a semi-dense disparity map in planetary surfaces images.. It works by modifying an initial disparity map as a deformable model under external and internal forces. Internal forces represent the continuity of the terrain while external forces represent the similarity of homologous pixels. The method is very flexible and can be applied globally or locally; the former characteristic make it very suitable to the stereo reconstruction of planetary surfaces. In such environments, where poor texture decrease the reliability of matches by local methods (e.g. image correlation), the new method should perform better and should be also more robust than only shape from shading. Besides, snakes make it easy to incorporate additional information. Even if the approach needs a not common use of memory and computer time that make it not usable for real-time applications, the investigation around the technique proposes the algorithm as a complete and extendible method for the surfaces remote sensing application. This work will show the application of the new method to the simulation of the stereo camera (STC) of SIMBIOSYS for the BepiColombo. During the presentation we will show few movies on the 3D reconstruction.