Monocular contextual constraint for stereo matching with adaptive weights assignment

Abstract

Matching-based stereo disparity estimation has difficulty in dealing with occlusion, weak and repetitive textures in binocular vision. By contrast, monocular vision, estimating depth from a single image, is not subject to these challenges. Inspired by this, in this study, we propose an adaptive co-learning framework with monocular and stereo branches named CLStereo to improve stereo performance. This framework introduces a monocular branch as contextual constraints to transfer the prior knowledge learned from the monocular branch to the stereo branch. An adaptive weights assignment is further proposed to balance the co-learning of both branches without mutually tuning. CLStereo can be seamlessly embedded into many existing deep stereo models to boost their performance, especially in occluded, weak, and repetitive texture areas. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the Scene Flow dataset and improve deep stereo models by at least 4% on KITTI 2012 and 2015 benchmarks.