Optimization Techniques for Solving Complex Problems

CHAPTER 20

Dense Stereo Disparity from an Artificial Life Standpoint

G. OLAGUE

Centro de Investigación Cientifica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada, México

F. FERNÁNDEZ

Universidad de Extremadura, Spain

C. B. PÉREZ

Centro de Investigación Cientificay de Educación Superior de Ensenada, México

E. LUTTON

Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, France

20.1 INTRODUCTION

Artificial life is devoted to the endeavor of understanding the general principles that govern the living state. The field of artificial life [1] covers a wide range of disciplines, such as biology, physics, robotics, and computer science. One of the first difficulties of studying artificial life is that there is no generally accepted definition of life. Moreover, an analytical approach to the study of life seems to be impossible. If we attempt to study a living system through gradual decomposition of its parts, we observe that the initial property of interest is no longer present. Thus, there appears to be no elementary living thing: Life seems to be a property of a collection of components but not a property of the components themselves. On the other hand, classical scientific fields have proved that the traditional approach of gradual decomposition of the whole is useful in modeling the physical reality. The aim of this chapter is to show that the problem of matching the contents of a stereoscopic ...