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.
@cite_7: 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 feature constancy that measures correctness of the correspondence between two input images. The initial disparity and the feature constancy are then fed to a sub-network to refine the initial disparity. 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.
@cite_8: 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.
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@cite_16: End-to-end deep-learning networks recently demonstrated extremely good performance for stereo matching. However, existing networks are difficult to use for practical applications since (1) they are memory-hungry and unable to process even modest-size images, (2) they have to be fully re-trained to handle a different disparity range. The Practical Deep Stereo (PDS) network that we propose addresses both issues: First, its architecture relies on novel bottleneck modules that drastically reduce the memory footprint in inference, and additional design choices allow to handle greater image size during training. This results in a model that leverages large image context to resolve matching ambiguities. Second, a novel sub-pixel cross-entropy loss combined with a MAP estimator make this network less sensitive to ambiguous matches, and applicable to any disparity range without re-training. We compare PDS to state-of-the-art methods published over the recent months, and demonstrate its superior performance on FlyingThings3D and KITTI sets.
@cite_13: We propose a novel deep learning architecture for regressing disparity from a rectified pair of stereo images. We leverage knowledge of the problem’s geometry to form a cost volume using deep feature representations. We learn to incorporate contextual information using 3-D convolutions over this volume. Disparity values are regressed from the cost volume using a proposed differentiable soft argmin operation, which allows us to train our method end-to-end to sub-pixel accuracy without any additional post-processing or regularization. We evaluate our method on the Scene Flow and KITTI datasets and on KITTI we set a new stateof-the-art benchmark, while being significantly faster than competing approaches.
@cite_12: Recent work has shown that depth estimation from a stereo pair of images can be formulated as a supervised learning task to be resolved with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, current architectures rely on patch-based Siamese networks, lacking the means to exploit context information for finding correspondence in illposed regions. To tackle this problem, we propose PSMNet, a pyramid stereo matching network consisting of two main modules: spatial pyramid pooling and 3D CNN. The spatial pyramid pooling module takes advantage of the capacity of global context information by aggregating context in different scales and locations to form a cost volume. The 3D CNN learns to regularize cost volume using stacked multiple hourglass networks in conjunction with intermediate supervision. The proposed approach was evaluated on several benchmark datasets. Our method ranked first in the KITTI 2012 and 2015 leaderboards before March 18, 2018. The codes of PSMNet are available at: this https URL
@cite_20: Today, visual recognition systems are still rarely employed in robotics applications. Perhaps one of the main reasons for this is the lack of demanding benchmarks that mimic such scenarios. In this paper, we take advantage of our autonomous driving platform to develop novel challenging benchmarks for the tasks of stereo, optical flow, visual odometry SLAM and 3D object detection. Our recording platform is equipped with four high resolution video cameras, a Velodyne laser scanner and a state-of-the-art localization system. Our benchmarks comprise 389 stereo and optical flow image pairs, stereo visual odometry sequences of 39.2 km length, and more than 200k 3D object annotations captured in cluttered scenarios (up to 15 cars and 30 pedestrians are visible per image). Results from state-of-the-art algorithms reveal that methods ranking high on established datasets such as Middlebury perform below average when being moved outside the laboratory to the real world. Our goal is to reduce this bias by providing challenging benchmarks with novel difficulties to the computer vision community. Our benchmarks are available online at: www.cvlibs.net datasets kitti
These methods were driven by the presence of moderate-sized real stereo datasets @cite_20 @cite_1 with ground-truth data captured using a LIDAR. Noting the benefits of learned methods for stereo, Mayer @cite_5 introduced a much larger, synthetically rendered, dataset to enable training of more complex networks---with layers that carry out both matching and globalization computations (the latter replacing traditional aggregation) and are trained end-to-end. GC-Net @cite_13 uses shared 2D convolutions to extract features from each image in the stereo pair, concatenates them to form a 4D tensor (indexed by spatial dimensions, disparity, and features) and then uses 3D convolution layers to process this cost volume. Since then, a number of methods have used a similar approach to using 3D convolutions with innovations in network architecture for cost-volume construction and processing @cite_8 @cite_12 @cite_16 @cite_7 , yielding improvements in accuracy and run-times. The fastest among these is the smaller DES-net architecture in @cite_7 , which primarily allocates layers for accurate cost computation and achieves a run-time of 0.05 seconds per stereo pair.