The matching formulation makes it naturally hard for the stereo matching to handle ill-posed regions like occlusions and non-Lambertian surfaces. Fusing monocular priors has been proven helpful for ill-posed matching, but the biased monocular prior learned from small stereo datasets constrains the generalization. Recently, stereo matching has progressed by leveraging the unbiased monocular prior from the vision foundation model (VFM) to improve the generalization in ill-posed regions. We dive into the fusion process and observe three main problems limiting the fusion of the VFM monocular prior. The first problem is the misalignment between affine-invariant relative monocular depth and absolute depth of disparity. Besides, when we use the monocular feature in an iterative update structure, the over-confidence in the disparity update leads to local optima results. A direct fusion of a monocular depth map could alleviate the local optima problem, but noisy disparity results computed at the first several iterations will misguide the fusion. In this paper, we propose a binary local ordering map to guide the fusion, which converts the depth map into a binary relative format, unifying the relative and absolute depth representation. The computed local ordering map is also used to re-weight the initial disparity update, resolving the local optima and noisy problem. In addition, we formulate the final direct fusion of monocular depth to the disparity as a registration problem, where a pixel-wise linear regression module can globally and adaptively align them. Our method fully exploits the monocular prior to support stereo matching results effectively and efficiently. We significantly improve the performance from the experiments when generalizing from SceneFlow to Middlebury and Booster datasets while barely reducing the efficiency.

3D visual illusion is a perceptual phenomenon where a two-dimensional plane is manipulated to simulate three-dimensional spatial relationships, making a flat artwork or object look three-dimensional in the human visual system. In this paper, we reveal that the machine visual system is also seriously fooled by 3D visual illusions, including monocular and binocular depth estimation. In order to explore and analyze the impact of 3D visual illusion on depth estimation, we collect a large dataset containing almost 3k scenes and 200k images to train and evaluate SOTA monocular and binocular depth estimation methods. We also propose a 3D visual illusion depth estimation framework that uses common sense from the vision language model to adaptively fuse depth from binocular disparity and monocular depth. Experiments show that SOTA monocular, binocular, and multi-view depth estimation approaches are all fooled by various 3D visual illusions, while our method achieves SOTA performance.

3D lane detection usually builds a dense correspondence between the front-view space and the BEV space to estimate lane points in the 3D space. 3D lanes only occupy a small ratio of the dense correspondence, while most correspondence belongs to the redundant background. This sparsity phenomenon bottlenecks valuable computation and raises the computation cost of building a high-resolution correspondence for accurate results. In this paper, we propose a sparse point-guided 3D lane detection, focusing on points related to 3D lanes. Our method runs in a coarse-to-fine manner, including coarse-level lane detection and iterative fine-level sparse point refinements. In coarse-level lane detection, we build a dense but efficient correspondence between the front view and BEV space at a very low resolution to compute coarse lanes. Then in fine-level sparse point refinement, we sample sparse points around coarse lanes to extract local features from the high-resolution front-view feature map. The high-resolution local information brought by sparse points refines 3D lanes in the BEV space hierarchically from low resolution to high resolution. The sparse point guides a more effective information flow and greatly promotes the SOTA result by 3 points on the overall F1-score and 6 points on several hard situations while reducing almost half memory cost and speeding up 2 times.

Stereo matching becomes computationally challenging when dealing with a large disparity range. Prior methods mainly alleviate the computation through dynamic cost volume by focusing on a local disparity space, but it requires many iterations to get close to the ground truth due to the lack of a global view. We find that the dynamic cost volume approximately encodes the disparity space as a single Gaussian distribution with a fixed and small variance at each iteration, which results in an inadequate global view over disparity space and a small update step at every iteration. In this paper, we propose a parameterized cost volume to encode the entire disparity space using multi-Gaussian distribution. The disparity distribution of each pixel is parameterized by weights, means, and variances. The means and variances are used to sample disparity candidates for cost computation, while the weights and means are used to calculate the disparity output. The above parameters are computed through a JS-divergence-based optimization, which is realized as a gradient descent update in a feed-forward differential module. Experiments show that our method speeds up the runtime of RAFT-Stereo by 4 ~ 15 times, achieving real-time performance and comparable accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/jiaxiZeng/Parameterized-Cost-Volume-for-Stereo-Matching.

Stereo matching in foggy scenes is challenging as the scattering effect of fog blurs the image and makes the matching ambiguous. Prior methods deem the fog as noise and discard it before matching. Different from them, we propose to explore depth hints from fog and improve stereo matching via these hints. The exploration of depth hints is designed from the perspective of rendering. The rendering is conducted by reversing the atmospheric scattering process and removing the fog within a selected depth range. The quality of the rendered image reflects the correctness of the selected depth, as the closer it is to the real depth, the clearer the rendered image is. We introduce a fog volume representation to collect these depth hints from the fog. We construct the fog volume by stacking images rendered with depths computed from disparity candidates that are also used to build the cost volume. We fuse the fog volume with cost volume to rectify the ambiguous matching caused by fog. Experiments show that our fog volume representation significantly promotes the SOTA result on foggy scenes by 10% ~ 30% while maintaining a comparable performance in clear scenes.

Deep neural networks have shown excellent performance for stereo matching. Many efforts focus on the feature extraction and similarity measurement of the matching cost computation step while less attention is paid on cost aggregation which is crucial for stereo matching. In this paper, we present a learning-based cost aggregation method for stereo matching by a novel sub-architecture in the end-to-end trainable pipeline. We reformulate the cost aggregation as a learning process of the generation and selection of cost aggregation proposals which indicate the possible cost aggregation results. The cost aggregation sub-architecture is realized by a two-stream network: one for the generation of cost aggregation proposals, the other for the selection of the proposals. The criterion for the selection is determined by the low-level structure information obtained from a light convolutional network. The two-stream network offers a global view guidance for the cost aggregation to rectify the mismatching value stemming from the limited view of the matching cost computation. The comprehensive experiments on challenge datasets such as KITTI and Scene Flow show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Most existing techniques detecting shared congestion paths are based on pair-wise comparison of paths with a common source or destination point. It is difficult to extend them to cluster paths with different sources and destinations. In this paper, we propose a scalable approach to cluster shared congestion paths based on PCA. This algorithm maps the delay measurement data of each path into a point in a new, low-dimensional space based on the factor loading matrix in PCA, which reflect correlation between paths. In this new space, points are close to each other if the corresponding paths share congestion. Then, the clustering analysis is applied to these points so as to identify shared congestion paths accurately. This algorithm is evaluated by NS2 simulations. The results show us that this algorithm has high accuracy.