Effects of Compression/Decompression on stereo image matching

Stereo matching is an important paradigm to obtain 3D data such as digital elevation models (DEMs) from planetary surface images being captured on-site from landers and rovers, or remote from orbiters or flying probes. Images taken from two different viewpoints (e.g. from a stereo set-up such as MSL Mastcam, or resulting from an orbiter camera trajectory) are compared pixel-by-pixel to determine parallaxes which can be used to calculate the 3D shape of the environment. Compression/Decompression (C/D) of the involved images in general reduces the similarity between the images to be matched and thus deteriorates the resulting 3D shape, reducing accuracy, reliability, and coverage.