Modern neural network-based algorithms are able to produce highly accurate depth estimates from stereo image pairs, nearly matching the reliability of measurements from more expensive depth sensors. However, this accuracy comes with a higher computational cost since these methods use network architectures designed to compute and process matching scores across all candidate matches at all locations, with floating point computations repeated across a match volume with dimensions corresponding to both space and disparity. This leads to longer running times to process each image pair, making them impractical for real-time use in robots and autonomous vehicles. We propose a new stereo algorithm that employs a significantly more efficient network architecture. Our method builds an initial match cost volume using traditional matching costs that are fast to compute, and trains a network to estimate disparity from this volume. Crucially, our network only employs per-pixel and two-dimensional convolution operations: to summarize the match information at each location as a low-dimensional feature vector, and to spatially process these cost-signature' features to produce a dense disparity map. Experimental results on the KITTI benchmark show that our method delivers competitive accuracy at significantly higher speeds---running at 48 frames per second on a modern GPU.
However, these matching scores are still ambiguous and thus local reasoning alone is insufficient for accurate disparity estimation. This is why stereo algorithms have a second globalization'' stage, where the local match information in the cost-volumes is aggregated while promoting properties such as smoothness, piece-wise planarity, etc. in the estimated disparity maps. This aggregation was traditionally as optimization of an energy function @cite_9 @cite_10 @cite_6 , again with an emphasis on computational efficiency.
@cite_9 @cite_10 @cite_6
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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. We propose an area-based local stereo matching algorithm for accurate disparity estimation across all image regions. A well-known challenge to local stereo methods is to decide an appropriate support window for the pixel under consideration, adapting the window shape or the pixelwise support weight to the underlying scene structures. Our stereo method tackles this problem with two key contributions. First, for each anchor pixel an upright cross local support skeleton is adaptively constructed, with four varying arm lengths decided on color similarity and connectivity constraints. Second, given the local cross-decision results, we dynamically construct a shape-adaptive full support region on the fly, merging horizontal segments of the crosses in the vertical neighborhood. Approximating image structures accurately, the proposed method is among the best performing local stereo methods according to the benchmark Middlebury stereo evaluation. Additionally, it reduces memory consumption significantly thanks to our compact local cross representation. To accelerate matching cost aggregation performed in an arbitrarily shaped 2-D region, we also propose an orthogonal integral image technique, yielding a speedup factor of 5-15 over the straightforward integration. Stereo matching algorithms usually consist of four steps, including matching cost calculation, matching cost aggregation, disparity calculation, and disparity refinement. Existing CNN-based methods only adopt CNN to solve parts of the four steps, or use different networks to deal with different steps, making them difficult to obtain the overall optimal solution. In this paper, we propose a network architecture to incorporate all steps of stereo matching. The network consists of three parts. The first part calculates the multi-scale shared features. The second part performs matching cost calculation, matching cost aggregation and disparity calculation to estimate the initial disparity using shared features. The initial disparity and the shared features are used to calculate the prior and posterior feature constancy. The initial disparity, the prior and posterior feature constancy are then fed to a sub-network to refine the initial disparity through a Bayesian inference process. The proposed method has been evaluated on the Scene Flow and KITTI datasets. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI 2012 and KITTI 2015 benchmarks while maintaining a very fast running time. This paper proposes a novel high-accuracy stereo matching scheme based on adaptive ground control points (AdaptGCP). Different from traditional fixed GCP-based methods, we consider color dissimilarity, spatial relation, and the pixel-matching reliability to select GCP adaptively in each local support window. To minimize the global energy, we propose a practical solution, named as alternating updating scheme of disparity and confidence map, which can effectively eliminate the redundant and interfering information of unreliable pixels. The disparity values of those unreliable pixels are reassigned with the information provided by local plane model, which is fitted with GCPs. Then, the confidence map is updated according to the disparity reassignment and the left—right consistency. Finally, the disparity map is refined by multistep filers. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our AdaptGCP scheme for regularizing the ill-posed matching problem. The top ranks on Middlebury benchmark with different error thresholds show that our algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performance among the latest stereo matching algorithms. This paper provides a new insight toward high-accuracy stereo matching.