The condition assessment of road surfaces is essential to ensure their serviceability while still providing maximum road traffic safety. This paper presents a robust stereo vision system embedded in an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The perspective view of the target image is first transformed into the reference view, and this not only improves the disparity accuracy, but also reduces the algorithm's computational complexity. The cost volumes generated from stereo matching are then filtered using a bilateral filter. The latter has been proved to be a feasible solution for the functional minimisation problem in a fully connected Markov random field model. Finally, the disparity maps are transformed by minimising an energy function with respect to the roll angle and disparity projection model. This makes the damaged road areas more distinguishable from the road surface. The proposed system is implemented on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU with CUDA for real-time purposes. It is demonstrated through experiments that the damaged road areas can be easily distinguished from the transformed disparity maps.
The two key aspects of computer stereo vision are speed and accuracy @cite_9 . A lot of research has been carried out over the past decades to improve either the disparity accuracy or the algorithm's computational complexity @cite_1 . The state-of-the-art stereo vision algorithms can be classified as convolutional neural network (CNN)-based @cite_12 @cite_35 @cite_22 @cite_11 @cite_17 and traditional @cite_1 @cite_38 @cite_24 @cite_37 @cite_27 @cite_15 . The former generally formulates disparity estimation as a binary classification problem and learns the probability distribution over all disparity values @cite_12 . For example, PSMNet @cite_32 generates the cost volumes by learning region-level features with different scales of receptive fields. Although these approaches have achieved some highly accurate disparity maps, they usually require a large amount of labelled training data to learn from. Therefore, it is impossible for them to work on the datasets without providing the disparity ground truth @cite_5 . Moreover, predicting disparities with CNNs is still a computationally intensive task, which usually takes seconds or even minutes to execute on state-of-the-art graphics cards @cite_9 . Therefore, the existing CNN-based stereo vision algorithms are not suitable for real-time applications.
@cite_35 @cite_38 @cite_37 @cite_22 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_17 @cite_32 @cite_24 @cite_27 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_12 @cite_11
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Leveraging on the recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), matching dense correspondence from a stereo pair has been cast as a learning problem, with performance exceeding traditional approaches. However, it remains challenging to generate high-quality disparities for the inherently ill-posed regions. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel cascade CNN architecture composing of two stages. The first stage advances the recently proposed DispNet by equipping it with extra up-convolution modules, leading to disparity images with more details. The second stage explicitly rectifies the disparity initialized by the first stage; it couples with the first-stage and generates residual signals across multiple scales. The summation of the outputs from the two stages gives the final disparity. As opposed to directly learning the disparity at the second stage, we show that residual learning provides more effective refinement. Moreover, it also benefits the training of the overall cascade network. Experimentation shows that our cascade residual learning scheme provides state-of-the-art performance for matching stereo correspondence. By the time of the submission of this paper, our method ranks first in the KITTI 2015 stereo benchmark, surpassing the prior works by a noteworthy margin. Leveraging on the recent developments in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), matching dense correspondence from a stereo pair has been cast as a learning problem, with performance exceeding traditional approaches. However, it remains challenging to generate high-quality disparities for the inherently ill-posed regions. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel cascade CNN architecture composing of two stages. The first stage advances the recently proposed DispNet by equipping it with extra up-convolution modules, leading to disparity images with more details. The second stage explicitly rectifies the disparity initialized by the first stage; it couples with the first-stage and generates residual signals across multiple scales. The summation of the outputs from the two stages gives the final disparity. As opposed to directly learning the disparity at the second stage, we show that residual learning provides more effective refinement. Moreover, it also benefits the training of the overall cascade network. Experimentation shows that our cascade residual learning scheme provides state-of-the-art performance for matching stereo correspondence. By the time of the submission of this paper, our method ranks first in the KITTI 2015 stereo benchmark, surpassing the prior works by a noteworthy margin. We present an improved three-step pipeline for the stereo matching problem and introduce multiple novelties at each stage. We propose a new highway network architecture for computing the matching cost at each possible disparity, based on multilevel weighted residual shortcuts, trained with a hybrid loss that supports multilevel comparison of image patches. A novel post-processing step is then introduced, which employs a second deep convolutional neural network for pooling global information from multiple disparities. This network outputs both the image disparity map, which replaces the conventional "winner takes all" strategy, and a confidence in the prediction. The confidence score is achieved by training the network with a new technique that we call the reflective loss. Lastly, the learned confidence is employed in order to better detect outliers in the refinement step. The proposed pipeline achieves state of the art accuracy on the largest and most competitive stereo benchmarks, and the learned confidence is shown to outperform all existing alternatives. Recently convolutional neural network (CNN) promotes the development of stereo matching greatly. Especially those end-to-end stereo methods achieve best performance. However less attention is paid on encoding context information, simplifying two-stage disparity learning pipeline and improving details in disparity maps. Differently we focus on these problems. Firstly, we propose an one-stage context pyramid based residual pyramid network (CP-RPN) for disparity estimation, in which a context pyramid is embedded to encode multi-scale context clues explicitly. Next, we design a CNN based multi-task learning network called EdgeStereo to recover missing details in disparity maps, utilizing mid-level features from edge detection task. In EdgeStereo, CP-RPN is integrated with a proposed edge detector HED @math based on two-fold multi-task interactions. The end-to-end EdgeStereo outputs the edge map and disparity map directly from a stereo pair without any post-processing or regularization. We discover that edge detection task and stereo matching task can help each other in our EdgeStereo framework. Comprehensive experiments on stereo benchmarks such as Scene Flow and KITTI 2015 show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.