LoS: Local Structure-Guided Stereo Matching

Kunhong Li, Longguang Wang, Ye Zhang, Kaiwen Xue, Shunbo Zhou, Yulan Guo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 19746-19756

Estimating disparities in challenging areas is difficult and limits the performance of stereo matching models. In this paper we exploit local structure information (LSI) to enhance stereo matching. Specifically our LSI comprises a series of key elements including the slant plane (parameterised by disparity gradients) disparity offset details and neighbouring relations. This LSI empowers our method to effectively handle intricate structures including object boundaries and curved surfaces. We bootstrap the LSI from monocular depth and subsequently iteratively refine it to better capture the underlying scene geometry constraints. Building upon the LSI we introduce the Local Structure-Guided Propagation (LSGP) which enhances the disparity initialization optimization and refinement processes. By combining LSGP with a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) we present our novel stereo matching method referred to as Local Structure-guided stereo matching (LoS). Remarkably LoS achieves top-ranking results on four widely recognized public benchmark datasets (ETH3D Middlebury KITTI 15 & 12) demonstrating the superior capabilities of our proposed model.