Stepwise Regression and Pre-trained Edge for Robust Stereo Matching

Due to the difficulty in obtaining real samples and ground truth, the generalization performance and the fine-tuned performance are critical for the feasibility of stereo matching methods in real-world applications. However, the presence of substantial disparity distributions and density variations across different datasets presents significant challenges for the generalization and fine-tuning of the model. In this paper, we propose a novel stereo matching method, called SR-Stereo, which mitigates the distributional differences across different datasets by predicting the disparity clips and uses a loss weight related to the regression target scale to improve the accuracy of the disparity clips. Moreover, this stepwise regression architecture can be easily extended to existing iteration-based methods to improve the performance without changing the structure. In addition, to mitigate the edge blurring of the fine-tuned model on sparse ground truth, we propose Domain Adaptation Based on Pre-trained Edges (DAPE). Specifically, we use the predicted disparity and RGB image to estimate the edge map of the target domain image. The edge map is filtered to generate edge map background pseudo-labels, which together with the sparse ground truth disparity on the target domain are used as a supervision to jointly fine-tune the pre-trained stereo matching model. These proposed methods are extensively evaluated on SceneFlow, KITTI, Middbury 2014 and ETH3D. The SR-Stereo achieves competitive disparity estimation performance and state-of-the-art cross-domain generalisation performance. Meanwhile, the proposed DAPE significantly improves the disparity estimation performance of fine-tuned models, especially in the textureless and detail regions.