Stereo ranging, which uses correspondence between sets of two or more images for depth measurement, has many advantages. It is passive and it does not emit any radio or light energy. With appropriate imaging geometry, optics, and high-resolution cameras, stereo can produce a dense, precise range image of even distant scenes. Our video-rate stereo machine is based on a new stereo technique which has been developed and tested at CMU over years. It uses multiple images obtained by multiple cameras to produce different baselines in lengths and in directions. The multi-baseline stereo method takes advantage of the redundancy contained in multi-stereo pairs, resulting in a straightforward algorithm which is appropriate for hardware implementation.

It is currently operational at the speed of 30 frames per second with 200W200 image size and 23 pixel disparity range.