Stereo is a prominent technique to infer dense depth maps from images, and
deep learning further pushed forward the state-of-the-art, making end-to-end
architectures unrivaled when enough data is available for training. However,
deep networks suffer from significant drops in accuracy when dealing with new
environments. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Guided Stereo Matching, a
novel paradigm leveraging a small amount of sparse, yet reliable depth
measurements retrieved from an external source enabling to ameliorate this
weakness. The additional sparse cues required by our method can be obtained
with any strategy (e.g., a LiDAR) and used to enhance features linked to
corresponding disparity hypotheses. Our formulation is general and fully
differentiable, thus enabling to exploit the additional sparse inputs in
pre-trained deep stereo networks as well as for training a new instance from
scratch. Extensive experiments on three standard datasets and two
state-of-the-art deep architectures show that even with a small set of sparse
input cues, i) the proposed paradigm enables significant improvements to
pre-trained networks. Moreover, ii) training from scratch notably increases
accuracy and robustness to domain shifts. Finally, iii) it is suited and
effective even with traditional stereo algorithms such as SGM.

本论文提出了一种新的导向立体匹配方法，利用来自外部源的少量稀疏但可靠的深度测量来提高现有深度学习模型在处理新环境时的准确性和鲁棒性，并证明此方法适用于传统的立体匹配算法，并且即使只输入少量稀疏数据，对现有模型的性能也有显著提升。