These Maps Are Made by Propagation:
Adapting Deep Stereo Networks to Road Scenarios
with Decisive Disparity Diffusion
Chuang-Wei Liu
Yikang Zhang
Qijun Chen
Ioannis Pitas
Rui Fan
[Supplementary Material]
[Papper]
[UDTIRI-Stereo]
[GitHub]

Abstract

Stereo matching has emerged as a cost-effective solution for road surface 3D reconstruction, garnering significant attention towards improving both computational efficiency and accuracy. This article introduces decisive disparity diffusion (D3Stereo), marking the first exploration of dense deep feature matching that uses pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) in previously unseen road scenarios. A pyramid of cost volumes is initially created using various levels of learned representations. Subsequently, a novel recursive bilateral filtering algorithm is employed to aggregate these costs. A key innovation of D3Stereo lies in its alternating decisive disparity diffusion strategy, wherein intra-scale diffusion is employed to complete sparse disparity images, while inter-scale inheritance provides valuable prior information for higher resolutions. Extensive experiments conducted on our created UDTIRI-Stereo and Stereo-Road datasets underscore the effectiveness of D3Stereo strategy in adapting pre-trained DCNNs and its superior performance compared to all other explicit programming-based algorithms designed specifically for road surface 3D reconstruction. Additional experiments conducted on the Middlebury dataset with backbone DCNNs pre-trained on the ImageNet database further validate the versatility of the D3Stereo strategy in tackling general stereo matching problems.


Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Xi'an Jiaotong University (No. HMHAI-202406), the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62473288 and 62233013, the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipal under Grant 22511104500, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, and the Xiaomi Young Talents Program. The research leading to these results has also received partial funding from the European Commission - European Union (under HORIZON EUROPE (HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions) under grant agreement 101093003 (TEMA) HORIZON-CL4-2022-DATA-01-01). Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union - European Commission. Neither the European Commission nor the European Union can be held responsible for them.