Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Warping for Robust and Efficient Stereo Matching

Junpeng Jing, Jiankun Li, Pengfei Xiong, Jiangyu Liu, Shuaicheng Liu, Yichen Guo, Xin Deng, Mai Xu, Lai Jiang, Leonid Sigal; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 3318-3327

Correlation based stereo matching has achieved outstanding performance, which pursues cost volume between two feature maps. Unfortunately, current methods with a fixed trained model do not work uniformly well across various datasets, greatly limiting their real-world applicability. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a new perspective to dynamically calculate correlation for robust stereo matching. A novel Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Correlation (UGAC) module is introduced to robustly adapt the same model for different scenarios. Specifically, a variance-based uncertainty estimation is employed to adaptively adjust the sampling area during warping operation. Additionally, we improve the traditional non-parametric warping with learnable parameters, such that the position-specific weights can be learned. We show that by empowering the recurrent network with the UGAC module, stereo matching can be exploited more robustly and effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance over the ETH3D, KITTI, and Middlebury datasets when employing the same fixed model over these datasets without any retraining procedure. To target real-time applications, we further design a lightweight model based on UGAC, which also outperforms other methods over KITTI benchmarks with only 0.6 M parameters.