I have been dipping my toes into OpenCV and the stereovision functions it contains, and am struggling to get good results while following instructions in both the OpenCV documentation and many articles online. Specifically, I believe that at this point I have managed to obtain a decent calibration of my cameras, a decent stereo calibration, and even a decent rectification, but when moving to create the disparity map I seem to get nonsense back.
I am using a set of self-acquired images taken with a Pentax K-3 ii camera using a Loreo Lens-in-a-cap CCD splitter which gives me "two" images taken on one CCD. I can then split the image in half (and trim some of the pixels near the overlap) to have a reliable baseline distance in world coordinates with the camera. I unfortunately have no information on the true focal length of this configuration but I would guess it is around 9cm.
I have performed camera calibration on each split-image set to get camera matrices, distance coefficients, and object and image points for use in epipolar geometry. Then, following the procedure laid out in [1,2], perform stereo calibration and rectification. I do not have the required reputation to embed images, so please click here. By my understanding, the fact that similar features in both images are similar distances to the true horizontal lines I have drawn across them means that this is a good rectification result and should be usable.
However, when I implement the following code to create the disparity map:
# Settings for cv.StereoSGBM_create
minDisparity = 1
numDisparities = 64
blockSize = 1
disp12MaxDiff = 1
uniquenessRatio = 10
speckleWindowSize = 0
speckleRange = 8
stereo = cv.StereoSGBM_create(minDisparity=minDisparity, numDisparities=numDisparities, blockSize=blockSize, disp12MaxDiff=disp12MaxDiff, uniquenessRatio=uniquenessRatio,
speckleWindowSize=speckleWindowSize, speckleRange=speckleRange)
# Calculate the disparity map
disp = stereo.compute(imgL, imgR).astype(np.float32)
# Normalize the values to spread them across the viewable range
disp = cv.normalize(disp,0,255,cv.NORM_MINMAX)
# Resize for display
disp = cv.resize(disp, (1000,1000))
cv.imshow("disparity",disp)
cv.waitKey(0)
The result is disheartening. Intuitively, seeing a lot of black space surrounding edges which actually are fairly well-defined (such as in the chessboard pattern or near my hands) would suggest that there is very little disparity. However it seems clear to me that the images are quite different in terms of translation, so I am a bit confused. I have been delving through the documentation and run out of ideas. I tried reusing the code that produced the initial set of epipolar lines provided here which seemed to work on the original image quite nicely. However, it produces epipolar lines which are certainly not horizontal. This tells me that something is wrong, but I do not understand what could be, especially given the "visual test" I described above. I suspect I am misapplying that section of the code.
One thought I have is that I need to use an ROI to select the valid parts of the image, but I am unsure how to go about this. I think this is supported by the odd streaking behavior at the right edge of the left image post-rectification.
I would appreciate any help that can be offered as at this point I am going a bit codeblind. I am limited to only 8 links due to my reputation, so please let me know if I can provide better images or documentation of my work.