Benchmarking on the 2006 Middlebury Stereo Dataset - c++

Question

my problem is the following:
I have developed a superpixel segmentation algorithm and i want to test how the superpixel behave in stereo imagery. For this i use the Middlebury Stereo Dataset 2006 (http://vision.middlebury.edu/stereo/data/scenes2006/), right now i load one pair of images segment them and then compute my metrics (basically a fancy IOU) on it. This now works properly and now i want to extend it that it not only uses one pair of stereo images but the whole dataset.
Programming language is C++.
Here lies the problem:
How would i efficiently load all images? Because the pairs are all in independent folders (for the structure of the folder see below).
My idea would be to have a list of paths to the folders and then import all images from one folder, compute everything and then load the next folder.
How would i do that?
Structure of each stereo pair is like that:
Folder with the name of the item (like cat, wood, baby, ...)
disp1.png
disp5.png
view1.png
view5.png
Right now at the start of the my program i load images like that:
String pathImageLeft = "/Users/Stereo/Left/view1.png";
String pathImageRight = "/Users/Stereo/Right/view5.png";
String pathDisparityLeft = "/Users/Stereo/DisparityMap/disp1.png";
String pathDisparityRight = "/Users/Stereo/DisparityMap/disp5.png";
Thanks for your ideas.

Answer 1

If I understood OP's question right, it can be reduced to
How can I access directories?
From C++17, there is a Filesystem libary available which provides access to directories in a portable way.
Namely, it provides a std::filesystem::directory_entry which
Represents a directory entry. The object stores a path as a member and may also store additional file attributes (hard link count, status, symlink status file size, and last write time) during directory iteration.
and a std::filesystem::directory_iterator
that iterates over the directory_entry elements of a directory (but does not visit the subdirectories). The iteration order is unspecified, except that each directory entry is visited only once. The special pathnames dot and dot-dot are skipped.
The provided links provide sample codes.
Before C++17, you either have to use boost::filesystem (which is actually an anchestor of the std::filesystem) or you have to use the OS specific functions which are usually of limited portability.
Concerning the latter, there are already existing questions in SO:
How to list files in a directory using the Windows API?
How can I get the list of files in a directory using C or C++?
How do I get a list of files in a directory in C++?
to list only a few.