Bilateral Grid Learning for Stereo Matching Networks

Real-time performance of stereo matching networks is important for many applications, such as automatic driving, robot navigation and augmented reality (AR). Although significant progress has been made in stereo matching networks in recent years, it is still challenging to balance realtime performance and accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel edge-preserving cost volume upsampling module based on the slicing operation in the learned bilateral grid. The slicing layer is parameter-free, which allows us to obtain a high quality cost volume of high resolution from a low-resolution cost volume under the guide of the learned guidance map efficiently. The proposed cost volume upsampling module can be seamlessly embedded into many existing stereo matching networks, such as GCNet, PSMNet, and GANet. The resulting networks are accelerated several times while maintaining comparable accuracy. Furthermore, we design a real-time network (named BGNet) based on this module, which outperforms existing published real-time deep stereo matching networks, as well as some complex networks on the KITTI stereo datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/YuhuaXu/BGNet.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a novel module for stereo matching networks that improves real-time performance and maintains accuracy. The module can be seamlessly embedded into existing networks to achieve significant acceleration. The real-time network based on this module outperforms existing networks on the KITTI dataset.