Learning the Distribution of Errors in Stereo Matching for Joint Disparity and Uncertainty Estimation

Liyan Chen, Weihan Wang, Philippos Mordohai; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 17235-17244

We present a new loss function for joint disparity and uncertainty estimation in deep stereo matching. Our work is motivated by the need for precise uncertainty estimates and the observation that multi-task learning often leads to improved performance in all tasks. We show that this can be achieved by requiring the distribution of uncertainty to match the distribution of disparity errors via a KL divergence term in the network's loss function. A differentiable soft-histogramming technique is used to approximate the distributions so that they can be used in the loss. We experimentally assess the effectiveness of our approach and observe significant improvements in both disparity and uncertainty prediction on large datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/lly00412/SEDNet.git.