Perception

Stereo Rectification

Stereo rectification is the reprojection of a stereo image pair onto a common virtual image plane so that corresponding points lie on the same horizontal scanline, reducing the correspondence search from two dimensions to one. It is computed from the cameras' intrinsic and extrinsic calibration, warping both images so epipolar lines become horizontal and aligned. Rectification is a standard preprocessing step before disparity estimation in stereo matching pipelines.

Why it matters for physical AI

Real-time depth on robots depends on scanline-restricted matching; degraded calibration silently breaks rectification, which is a leading cause of depth artifacts in fielded systems.