Coordinating Multiple Disparity Proposals for Stereo Computation

Ang Li, Dapeng Chen, Yuanliu Liu, Zejian Yuan; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 4022-4030

While great progress has been made in stereo computation over the last decades, large textureless regions remain challenging. Segment-based methods can tackle this problem properly, but their performances are sensitive to the segmentation results. In this paper, we alleviate the sensitivity by generating multiple proposals on absolute and relative disparities from multi-segmentations. These proposals supply rich descriptions of surface structures. Especially, the relative disparity between distant pixels can encode the large structure, which is critical to handle the large texture-less regions. The proposals are coordinated by point-wise competition and pairwise collaboration within a MRF model. During inference, a dynamic programming is performed in different directions with various step sizes, so the long-range connections are better preserved. In the experiments, we carefully analyzed the effectiveness of the major components. Results on the 2014 Middlebury and KITTI 2015 stereo benchmark show that our method is comparable to state-of-the-art.