Variational principles, surface evolution, PDE's, level set methods, and the stereo problem

The techniques of surface and curve evolutions developed in computer vision and referred to as 'snakes' were reformulated in the context of partial differential equations driven evolving curves. These snakes can be used to solve three-dimensional vision problems including motion and stereo analysis. Two or more images of the world are taken simultaneously in the stereo problem. The problem is identified as the establishment of correspondences between views. The matching problem is commonly solved by organizing a matching functional.