The soft-argmax operation is widely adopted in neural network-based stereo matching methods to enable differentiable regression of disparity. However, networks trained with soft-argmax tend to predict multimodal probability distributions due to the absence of explicit constraints on the shape of the distribution. Previous methods leveraged Laplacian distributions and cross-entropy for training but failed to effectively improve accuracy and even increased the network’s processing time. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Sampling-Gaussian as a substitute for soft-argmax. It improves accuracy without increasing inference time. We innovatively interpret the training process as minimizing the distance in vector space and propose a combined loss of L1 loss and cosine similarity loss. We leveraged the normalized discrete Gaussian distribution for supervision. Moreover, we identified two issues in previous methods and proposed extending the disparity range and employing bilinear interpolation as solutions. We have conducted comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of our Sampling-Gaussian method. The experimental results prove that we have achieved better accuracy on five baseline methods across four datasets. Moreover, we have achieved significant improvements on small datasets and models with weaker generalization capabilities. Our method is easy to implement, and the code is available online.

In recent years, numerous real-time stereo matching methods have been introduced, but they often lack accuracy. These methods attempt to improve accuracy by introducing new modules or integrating traditional methods. However, the improvements are only modest. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy by incorporating knowledge distillation and model pruning to overcome the inherent trade-off between speed and accuracy. As a result, we obtained a model that maintains real-time performance while delivering high accuracy on edge devices. Our proposed method involves three key steps. Firstly, we review state-of-the-art methods and design our lightweight model by removing redundant modules from those efficient models through a comparison of their contributions. Next, we leverage the efficient model as the teacher to distill knowledge into the lightweight model. Finally, we systematically prune the lightweight model to obtain the final model. Through extensive experiments conducted on two widely-used benchmarks, Sceneflow and KITTI, we perform ablation studies to analyze the effectiveness of each module and present our state-of-the-art results.

Disparity estimation is a popular topic in computer vision and has drawn increasing attention in recent years. In this article, we propose a new multi-stage network for the purpose of two to three-dimensional video conversion that contains two training stages: an initial disparity estimation as the first training stage and depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) as an extra component to form the second training stage. In the first training stage, we propose a revised end-to-end feature pyramid stereo network, in which the original non-pyramid structure is replaced by a bottom-up convolutional neural network pyramid for disparity regression. It utilizes the spatial information by concatenating different scale features to boost the performance on boundary consistency. Mirror connections between feature extraction and disparity regression on the corresponding layers are also added to improve the quality of the results. In the second stage, we propose an improved disocclusion filling technique in the DIBR branch and connect the non-neural-network method to the disparity estimation network. This two-stage training strategy can work effectively to generate the improved disparity estimation for two to three-dimensional video conversion. Extensive experiments are conducted and some selected state-of-the-art algorithms are compared with our proposed approach on the popular KITTI2015 and Scene Flow datasets. The results demonstrate that our estimated disparity map can generate high quality 3D images.