A Full Density Stereo Matching System Based on the Combination of CNNs and Slanted-Planes

Abstract

Stereo matching methods consist of matching cost computation and several post processing steps. Deep learning methods have greatly raised the accuracy of matching cost and achieved the lowest error rate on several public datasets. However, their generality capabilities are not the best due to potential overfitting, which is the common problem of supervised learning approaches. This paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) based cost estimation method for computing the similarity of image patches. In consideration of accuracy and generalization capability, small size convolution kernels are chosen in the convolution layer and dropout in the decision layer is used for preventing overfitting. After obtaining stereo matching cost from the output of the CNN, several post-processing operations are adopted for disparity optimization, which includes semi-global matching in 1-D from different directions, a left-right consistency check, and the slanted plane smoothing method. The method is evaluated on KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, and Middlebury stereo datasets and the experimental results on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate the competitive accuracy performance of the approach. Additionally, to test the generalization of the method, a series of extended crossover experiments are conducted in which the training samples and testing samples come from different datasets. The results indicate superior generalization capability of our method than other supervised learning methods.