Current stereo matching techniques are challenged by restricted searching space, occluded regions and sheer size. While single image depth estimation is spared from these challenges and can achieve satisfactory results with the extracted monocular cues, the lack of stereoscopic relationship renders the monocular prediction less reliable on its own, especially in highly dynamic or cluttered environments. To address these issues in both scenarios, we present an optic-chiasm-inspired self-supervised binocular depth estimation method, wherein a vision transformer (ViT) with gated positional cross-attention (GPCA) layers is designed to enable feature-sensitive pattern retrieval between views while retaining the extensive context information aggregated through self-attentions. Monocular cues from a single view are thereafter conditionally rectified by a blending layer with the retrieved pattern pairs. This crossover design is biologically analogous to the optic-chasma structure in the human visual system and hence the name, ChiTransformer. Our experiments show that this architecture yields substantial improvements over state-of-the-art self-supervised stereo approaches by 11%, and can be used on both rectilinear and non-rectilinear (e.g., fisheye) images. Project is available at https://github.com/ISL-CV/ChiTransformer.
MonSter++: Unified Stereo Matching, Multi-view Stereo, and Real-time Stereo with Monodepth Priors
School of Electronic Information and Communications, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（电子信息与通讯学院，华中科技大学）；Meta；AI Chip Center, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学人工智能芯片中心）；Nanjing Forestry University（南京林业大学）；Autel Robotics
Aerial Multi-View Stereo via Adaptive Depth Range Inference and Normal Cues
Department of Information Science and Technology, Ocean University of China（信息科学与技术学院，中国海洋大学）；School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Leicester（计算与数学科学学院，莱斯特大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University（电气与计算机工程学院，密苏里州立大学）
Stereo Anywhere: Robust Zero-Shot Deep Stereo Matching Even Where Either Stereo or Mono Fail
Advanced Research Center on Electronic System (ARCES)（电子系统高级研究中心）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering (DISI)（计算机科学与工程系）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
We present a novel framework to automatically learn to transform the differential cues from a stack of images densely captured with a rotational motion into spatially discriminative and view-invariant per-pixel features at each view. These low-level features can be directly fed to any existing multi-view stereo technique for enhanced 3D reconstruction. The lighting condition during acquisition can also be jointly optimized in a differentiable fashion. We sample from a dozen of pre-scanned objects with a wide variety of geometry and reflectance to synthesize a large amount of high-quality train…
Monocular visual odometry approaches that purely rely on geometric cues are prone to scale drift and require sufficient motion parallax in successive frames for motion estimation and 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we propose to leverage deep monocular depth prediction to overcome limitations of geometry-based monocular visual odometry. To this end, we incorporate deep depth predictions into Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) as direct virtual stereo measurements. For depth prediction, we design a novel deep network that refines predicted depth from a single image in a two-stage process. We train …
Depth estimation from a single image represents a fascinating, yet challenging problem with countless applications. Recent works proved that this task could be learned without direct supervision from ground truth labels leveraging image synthesis on sequences or stereo pairs. Focusing on this second case, in this paper we leverage stereo matching in order to improve monocular depth estimation. To this aim we propose monoResMatch, a novel deep architecture designed to infer depth from a single input image by synthesizing features from a different point of view, horizontally aligned with the inp…
Stereo matching is one of the widely used techniques for inferring depth from stereo images owing to its robustness and speed. It has become one of the major topics of research since it finds its applications in autonomous driving, robotic navigation, 3D reconstruction, and many other fields. Finding pixel correspondences in non-textured, occluded and reflective areas is the major challenge in stereo matching. Recent developments have shown that semantic cues from image segmentation can be used to improve the results of stereo matching. Many deep neural network architectures have been proposed…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
In self-supervised monocular depth estimation, the depth discontinuity and motion objects' artifacts are still challenging problems. Existing self-supervised methods usually utilize a single view to train the depth estimation network. Compared with static views, abundant dynamic properties between video frames are beneficial to refined depth estimation, especially for dynamic objects. In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised joint learning framework for depth estimation using consecutive frames from monocular and stereo videos. The main idea is using an implicit depth cue extractor whi…
Stereo-Inertial Poser: Towards Metric-Accurate Shape-Aware Motion Capture Using Sparse IMUs and a Single Stereo Camera
School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学学院）；Meta Robotics Institute, SJTU（SJTU机器人研究院）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）
Rethinking Monocular Depth Embedding for Generalized Stereo Matching
Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Network Computing and Security Technology, Xi’an University of Technology（陕西理工大学网络计算与安全技术重点实验室）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）
LinStereo: Linear-Complexity Global Attention for Multi-Scale Iterative Stereo Matching
Australian Centre for Robotics (ACFR), School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering (AMME), Faculty of Engineering, The University of Sydney（悉尼大学工程学院航空航天、机械与机电工程学院澳大利亚机器人中心（ACFR））
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；PhiGent Robotics（PhiGent机器人公司）；Kwai Inc.（快手公司）
Learning-based Multi-View Stereo (MVS) methods warp source images into the reference camera frustum to form 3D volumes, which are fused as a cost volume to be regularized by subsequent networks. The fusing step plays a vital role in bridging 2D semantics and 3D spatial associations. However, previous methods utilize extra networks to learn 2D information as fusing cues, underusing 3D spatial correlations and bringing additional computation costs. Therefore, we present MVSTER, which leverages the proposed epipolar Transformer to learn both 2D semantics and 3D spatial associations efficiently. S…
Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
Estimating depth from a single RGB images is a fundamental task in computer vision, which is most directly solved using supervised deep learning. In the field of unsupervised learning of depth from a single RGB image, depth is not given explicitly. Existing work in the field receives either a stereo pair, a monocular video, or multiple views, and, using losses that are based on structure-from-motion, trains a depth estimation network. In this work, we rely, instead of different views, on depth from focus cues. Learning is based on a novel Point Spread Function convolutional layer, which applie…
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）
In recent years, neural implicit surface reconstruction methods have become popular for multi-view 3D reconstruction. In contrast to traditional multi-view stereo methods, these approaches tend to produce smoother and more complete reconstructions due to the inductive smoothness bias of neural networks. State-of-the-art neural implicit methods allow for high-quality reconstructions of simple scenes from many input views. Yet, their performance drops significantly for larger and more complex scenes and scenes captured from sparse viewpoints. This is caused primarily by the inherent ambiguity in…
Centre for Research and Technology Hellas（希腊研究与技术中心）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）
Spherical cameras capture scenes in a holistic manner and have been used for room layout estimation. Recently, with the availability of appropriate datasets, there has also been progress in depth estimation from a single omnidirectional image. While these two tasks are complementary, few works have been able to explore them in parallel to advance indoor geometric perception, and those that have done so either relied on synthetic data, or used small scale datasets, as few options are available that include both layout annotations and dense depth maps in real scenes. This is partly due to the ne…
Obtaining accurate depth measurements out of a single image represents a fascinating solution to 3D sensing. CNNs led to considerable improvements in this field, and recent trends replaced the need for ground-truth labels with geometry-guided image reconstruction signals enabling unsupervised training. Currently, for this purpose, state-of-the-art techniques rely on images acquired with a binocular stereo rig to predict inverse depth (i.e., disparity) according to the aforementioned supervision principle. However, these methods suffer from well-known problems near occlusions, left image border…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Stereoscopic perception is an important part of human visual system that allows the brain to perceive depth. However, depth information has not been well explored in existing saliency detection models. In this letter, a novel saliency detection method for stereoscopic images is proposed. Firstly, we propose a measure to evaluate the reliability of depth map, and use it to reduce the influence of poor depth map on saliency detection. Then, the input image is represented as a graph, and the depth information is introduced into graph construction. After that, a new definition of compactness using…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Dyson Robot Learning Lab（戴森机器人学习实验室）；Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics（香港物流机器人中心）
Most existing methods for category-level pose estimation rely on object point clouds. However, when considering transparent objects, depth cameras are usually not able to capture meaningful data, resulting in point clouds with severe artifacts. Without a high-quality point cloud, existing methods are not applicable to challenging transparent objects. To tackle this problem, we present StereoPose, a novel stereo image framework for category-level object pose estimation, ideally suited for transparent objects. For a robust estimation from pure stereo images, we develop a pipeline that decouples …
University of Illinois（伊利诺伊大学）；Microsoft Research New England（微软新英格兰研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We describe a technique that automatically generates plausible depth maps from videos using non-parametric depth sampling. We demonstrate our technique in cases where past methods fail (non-translating cameras and dynamic scenes). Our technique is applicable to single images as well as videos. For videos, we use local motion cues to improve the inferred depth maps, while optical flow is used to ensure temporal depth consistency. For training and evaluation, we use a Kinect-based system to collect a large dataset containing stereoscopic videos with known depths. We show that our depth estimatio…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；PhiGent Robotics（鉴智机器人）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Self-supervised monocular methods can efficiently learn depth information of weakly textured surfaces or reflective objects. However, the depth accuracy is limited due to the inherent ambiguity in monocular geometric modeling. In contrast, multi-frame depth estimation methods improve the depth accuracy thanks to the success of Multi-View Stereo (MVS), which directly makes use of geometric constraints. Unfortunately, MVS often suffers from texture-less regions, non-Lambertian surfaces, and moving objects, especially in real-world video sequences without known camera motion and depth supervision…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Microsoft Research New England（微软新英格兰研究院）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We describe a technique that automatically generates plausible depth maps from videos using non-parametric depth sampling. We demonstrate our technique in cases where past methods fail (non-translating cameras and dynamic scenes). Our technique is applicable to single images as well as videos. For videos, we use local motion cues to improve the inferred depth maps, while optical flow is used to ensure temporal depth consistency. For training and evaluation, we use a Kinect-based system to collect a large dataset containing stereoscopic videos with known depths. We show that our depth estimatio…
Dense depth estimation from a single image is a key problem in computer vision, with exciting applications in a multitude of robotic tasks. Initially viewed as a direct regression problem, requiring annotated labels as supervision at training time, in the past few years a substantial amount of work has been done in self-supervised depth training based on strong geometric cues, both from stereo cameras and more recently from monocular video sequences. In this paper we investigate how these two approaches (supervised & self-supervised) can be effectively combined, so that a depth model can learn…
College of Electronic Science and Technology, Nation University of Defense Technology (NUDT)（国防科技大学电子科学学院）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学电子与通信工程学院）
Stereo image pairs encode 3D scene cues into stereo correspondences between the left and right images. To exploit 3D cues within stereo images, recent CNN based methods commonly use cost volume techniques to capture stereo correspondence over large disparities. However, since disparities can vary significantly for stereo cameras with different baselines, focal lengths and resolutions, the fixed maximum disparity used in cost volume techniques hinders them to handle different stereo image pairs with large disparity variations. In this paper, we propose a generic parallax-attention mechanism (PA…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Directly learning multiple 3D objects motion from sequential images is difficult, while the geometric bundle adjustment lacks the ability to localize the invisible object centroid. To benefit from both the powerful object understanding skill from deep neural network meanwhile tackle precise geometry modeling for consistent trajectory estimation, we propose a joint spatial-temporal optimization-based stereo 3D object tracking method. From the network, we detect corresponding 2D bounding boxes on adjacent images and regress an initial 3D bounding box. Dense object cues (local depth and local coo…
EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Visual Intelligence for Transportation (VITA) lab（交通视觉智能实验室）
Monocular and stereo visions are cost-effective solutions for 3D human localization in the context of self-driving cars or social robots. However, they are usually developed independently and have their respective strengths and limitations. We propose a novel unified learning framework that leverages the strengths of both monocular and stereo cues for 3D human localization. Our method jointly (i) associates humans in left-right images, (ii) deals with occluded and distant cases in stereo settings by relying on the robustness of monocular cues, and (iii) tackles the intrinsic ambiguity of monoc…
Today's state-of-the-art methods for 3D object detection are based on lidar, stereo, or monocular cameras. Lidar-based methods achieve the best accuracy, but have a large footprint, high cost, and mechanically-limited angular sampling rates, resulting in low spatial resolution at long ranges. Recent approaches based on low-cost monocular or stereo cameras promise to overcome these limitations but struggle in low-light or low-contrast regions as they rely on passive CMOS sensors. In this work, we propose a novel 3D object detection modality that exploits temporal illumination cues from a low-co…
Localizing stereo boundaries and predicting nearby disparities are difficult because stereo boundaries induce occluded regions where matching cues are absent. Most modern computer vision algorithms treat occlusions secondarily (e.g., via left-right consistency checks after matching) or rely on high-level cues to improve nearby disparities (e.g., via deep networks and large training sets). They ignore the geometry of stereo occlusions, which dictates that the spatial extent of occlusion must equal the amplitude of the disparity jump that causes it. This paper introduces an energy and level-set …
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）
Objective: The computation of anatomical information and laparoscope position is a fundamental block of surgical navigation in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS). Recovering a dense 3D structure of surgical scene using visual cues remains a challenge, and the online laparoscopic tracking primarily relies on external sensors, which increases system complexity. Methods: Here, we propose a learning-driven framework, in which an image-guided laparoscopic localization with 3D reconstructions of complex anatomical structures is obtained. To reconstruct the 3D structure of the whole surgical environmen…
Depth estimation from a single image represents a very exciting challenge in computer vision. While other image-based depth sensing techniques leverage on the geometry between different viewpoints (e.g., stereo or structure from motion), the lack of these cues within a single image renders ill-posed the monocular depth estimation task. For inference, state-of-the-art encoder-decoder architectures for monocular depth estimation rely on effective feature representations learned at training time. For unsupervised training of these models, geometry has been effectively exploited by suitable images…
The performance of image based stereo estimation suffers from lighting variations, repetitive patterns and homogeneous appearance. Moreover, to achieve good performance, stereo supervision requires sufficient densely-labeled data, which are hard to obtain. In this work, we leverage small amount of data with very sparse but accurate disparity cues from LiDAR to bridge the gap. We propose a novel sparsity expansion technique to expand the sparse cues concerning RGB images for local feature enhancement. The feature enhancement method can be easily applied to any stereo estimation algorithms with …
Localizing stereo boundaries is difficult because matching cues are absent in the occluded regions that are adjacent to them. We introduce an energy and level-set optimizer that improves boundaries by encoding the essential geometry of occlusions: The spatial extent of an occlusion must equal the amplitude of the disparity jump that causes it. In a collection of figure-ground scenes from Middlebury and Falling Things stereo datasets, the model provides more accurate boundaries than previous occlusion-handling techniques.
Photometric Stereo (PS) under outdoor illumination remains a challenging, ill-posed problem due to insufficient variability in illumination. Months-long capture sessions are typically used in this setup, with little success on shorter, single-day time intervals. In this paper, we investigate the solution of outdoor PS over a single day, under different weather conditions. First, we investigate the relationship between weather and surface reconstructability in order to understand when natural lighting allows existing PS algorithms to work. Our analysis reveals that partially cloudy days improve…
DGene Inc.（DGene 公司）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Human visual system relies on both binocular stereo cues and monocular focusness cues to gain effective 3D perception. In computer vision, the two problems are traditionally solved in separate tracks. In this paper, we present a unified learning-based technique that simultaneously uses both types of cues for depth inference. Specifically, we use a pair of focal stacks as input to emulate human perception. We first construct a comprehensive focal stack training dataset synthesized by depth-guided light field rendering. We then construct three individual networks: a Focus-Net to extract depth fr…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Tencent YouTu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Disparity estimation for binocular stereo images finds a wide range of applications. Traditional algorithms may fail on featureless regions, which could be handled by high-level clues such as semantic segments. In this paper, we suggest that appropriate incorporation of semantic cues can greatly rectify prediction in commonly-used disparity estimation frameworks. Our method conducts semantic feature embedding and regularizes semantic cues as the loss term to improve learning disparity. Our unified model SegStereo employs semantic features from segmentation and introduces semantic softmax loss,…
Although recent years have witnessed the great advances in stereo image super-resolution (SR), the beneficial information provided by binocular systems has not been fully used. Since stereo images are highly symmetric under epipolar constraint, in this paper, we improve the performance of stereo image SR by exploiting symmetry cues in stereo image pairs. Specifically, we propose a symmetric bi-directional parallax attention module (biPAM) and an inline occlusion handling scheme to effectively interact cross-view information. Then, we design a Siamese network equipped with a biPAM to super-reso…
Geometry Reinforced Efficient Attention Tuning Equipped with Normals for Robust Stereo Matching
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science, Southern Methodist University（南卫理公会大学计算机科学系）；Hon Hai Research Institute（鸿海研究院）
Deep learning techniques have enabled rapid progress in monocular depth estimation, but their quality is limited by the ill-posed nature of the problem and the scarcity of high quality datasets. We estimate depth from a single camera by leveraging the dual-pixel auto-focus hardware that is increasingly common on modern camera sensors. Classic stereo algorithms and prior learning-based depth estimation techniques under-perform when applied on this dual-pixel data, the former due to too-strong assumptions about RGB image matching, and the latter due to not leveraging the understanding of optics …
We present a fully data-driven method to compute depth from diverse monocular video sequences that contain large amounts of non-rigid objects, e.g., people. In order to learn reconstruction cues for non-rigid scenes, we introduce a new dataset consisting of stereo videos scraped in-the-wild. This dataset has a wide variety of scene types, and features large amounts of nonrigid objects, especially people. From this, we compute disparity maps to be used as supervision to train our approach. We propose a loss function that allows us to generate a depth prediction even with unknown camera intrinsi…
