  Semi-Global Matching (SGM) is a widely-used efficient stereo matching
technique. It works well for textured scenes, but fails on untextured slanted
surfaces due to its fronto-parallel smoothness assumption. To remedy this
problem, we propose a simple extension, termed SGM-P, to utilize precomputed
surface orientation priors. Such priors favor different surface slants in
different 2D image regions or 3D scene regions and can be derived in various
ways. In this paper we evaluate plane orientation priors derived from stereo
matching at a coarser resolution and show that such priors can yield
significant performance gains for difficult weakly-textured scenes. We also
explore surface normal priors derived from Manhattan-world assumptions, and we
analyze the potential performance gains using oracle priors derived from
ground-truth data. SGM-P only adds a minor computational overhead to SGM and is
an attractive alternative to more complex methods employing higher-order
smoothness terms.
