Robust, Efficient Depth Reconstruction With Hierarchical Confidence-Based Matching

Deep Stereo Matching With Hysteresis Attention and Supervised Cost Volume Construction

Stereo matching disparity prediction for rectified image pairs is of great importance to many vision tasks such as depth sensing and autonomous driving. Previous work on the end-to-end unary trained networks follows the pipeline of feature extraction, cost volume construction, matching cost aggregation, and disparity regression. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network architecture for stereo matching aiming at improving the first and second stages of the matching pipeline. Specifically, we show a network design inspired by hysteresis comparator in the circuit as our attention mechanism. Our attention module is multiple-block and generates an attentive feature directly from the input. The cost volume is constructed in a supervised way. We try to use data-driven to find a good balance between informativeness and compactness of extracted feature maps. The proposed approach is evaluated on several benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods on SceneFlow, KITTI 2012, and KITTI 2015 datasets.

Accurate hierarchical stereo matching based on 3D plane labeling of superpixel for stereo images from rovers

An accurate hierarchical stereo matching method is proposed based on continuous 3D plane labeling of superpixel for rover’s stereo images. This method can infer the 3D plane label of each pixel combined with the slanted-patch matching strategy and coarse-to-fine constraints, which is especially suitable for large-scale scene matching with low-texture or textureless regions. At every level, the stereo matching method based on superpixel segmentation makes the iteration convergence faster and avoids huge redundant computations. In the coarse-to-fine matching scheme, we propose disparity constraint and 3D normal vector constraint between adjacent levels through which the disparity map and 3D normal vector map at a coarser level are used to restrict the search range of disparity and normal vector at a fine level. The experimental results with the Chang’e-3 rover dataset and the KITTI dataset show that the proposed stereo matching method is efficiently and accurately compared with the state-of-the-art 3D labeling algorithm, especially in low-texture or textureless regions. The computational efficiency of this method is about five to six times faster than the state-of-the-art 3D labeling method, and the accuracy is better.

Binocular Light-Field: Imaging Theory and Occlusion-Robust Depth Perception Application

Binocular stereo vision (SV) has been widely used to reconstruct the depth information, but it is quite vulnerable to scenes with strong occlusions. As an emerging computational photography technology, light-field (LF) imaging brings about a novel solution to passive depth perception by recording multiple angular views in a single exposure. In this paper, we explore binocular SV and LF imaging to form the binocular-LF imaging system. An imaging theory is derived by modeling the imaging process and analyzing disparity properties based on the geometrical optics theory. Then an accurate occlusion-robust depth estimation algorithm is proposed by exploiting multibaseline stereo matching cues and defocus cues. The occlusions caused by binocular SV and LF imaging are detected and handled to eliminate the matching ambiguities and outliers. Finally, we develop a binocular-LF database and capture realworld scenes by our binocular-LF system to test the accuracy and robustness. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm definitely recovers high quality depth maps with smooth surfaces and precise geometric shapes, which tackles the drawbacks of binocular SV and LF imaging simultaneously.