An Edge-Sense Bidirectional Pyramid Network for Stereo Matching of VHR Remote Sensing Images

As an essential step in 3D reconstruction, stereo matching still faces unignorable problems due to the high resolution and complex structures of remote sensing images. Especially in occluded areas of tall buildings and textureless areas of waters and woods, precise disparity estimation has become a difficult but important task. In this paper, we develop a novel edge-sense bidirectional pyramid stereo matching network to solve the aforementioned problems. The cost volume is constructed from negative to positive disparities since the disparity range in remote sensing images varies greatly and traditional deep learning networks only work well for positive disparities. Then, the occlusion-aware maps based on the forward-backward consistency assumption are applied to reduce the influence of the occluded area. Moreover, we design an edge-sense smoothness loss to improve the performance of textureless areas while maintaining the main structure. The proposed network is compared with two baselines. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms two methods, DenseMapNet and PSMNet, in terms of averaged endpoint error (EPE) and the fraction of erroneous pixels (D1), and the improvements in occluded and textureless areas are significant.