Parallax attention stereo matching network based on the improved group-wise correlation stereo network

Recent stereo matching methods, especially end-to-end deep stereo matching networks, have achieved remarkable performance in the fields of autonomous driving and depth sensing. However, state-of-the-art stereo algorithms, even with the deep neural network framework, still have difficulties at finding correct correspondences in near-range regions and object edge cues. To reinforce the precision of disparity prediction, in the present study, we propose a parallax attention stereo matching algorithm based on the improved group-wise correlation stereo network to learn the disparity content from a stereo correspondence, and it supports end-to-end predictions of both disparity map and edge map. Particular, we advocate for a parallax attention module in three-dimensional (disparity, height and width) level, which structure ensures high-precision estimation by improving feature expression in near-range regions. This is critical for computer vision tasks and can be utilized in several existing models to enhance their performance. Moreover, in order to making full use of the edge information learned by two-dimensional feature extraction network, we propose a novel edge detection branch and multi-featured integration cost volume. It is demonstrated that based on our model, edge detection project is conducive to improve the accuracy of disparity estimation. Our method achieves better results than previous works on both Scene Flow and KITTI datasets.