Match Stereo Videos via Bidirectional Alignment

Video stereo matching is the task of estimating consistent disparity maps from rectified stereo videos. There is considerable scope for improvement in both datasets and methods within this area. Recent learning-based methods often focus on optimizing performance for independent stereo pairs, leading to temporal inconsistencies in videos. Existing video methods typically employ sliding window operation over time dimension, which can result in low-frequency oscillations corresponding to the window size. To address these challenges, we propose a bidirectional alignment mechanism for adjacent frames as a fundamental operation. Building on this, we introduce a novel video processing framework, BiDAStereo, and a plugin stabilizer network, BiDAStabilizer, compatible with general image-based methods. Regarding datasets, current synthetic object-based and indoor datasets are commonly used for training and benchmarking, with a lack of outdoor nature scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present a realistic synthetic dataset and benchmark focused on natural scenes, along with a real-world dataset captured by a stereo camera in diverse urban scenes for qualitative evaluation. Extensive experiments on in-domain, out-of-domain, and robustness evaluation demonstrate the contribution of our methods and datasets, showcasing improvements in prediction quality and achieving state-of-the-art results on various commonly used benchmarks. The project page, demos, code, and datasets are available at: \url{https://tomtomtommi.github.io/BiDAVideo/}.

OpenDlign: Enhancing Open-World 3D Learning with Depth-Aligned Images

Recent advances in Vision and Language Models (VLMs) have improved open-world 3D representation, facilitating 3D zero-shot capability in unseen categories. Existing open-world methods pre-train an extra 3D encoder to align features from 3D data (e.g., depth maps or point clouds) with CAD-rendered images and corresponding texts. However, the limited color and texture variations in CAD images can compromise the alignment robustness. Furthermore, the volume discrepancy between pre-training datasets of the 3D encoder and VLM leads to sub-optimal 2D to 3D knowledge transfer. To overcome these issues, we propose OpenDlign, a novel framework for learning open-world 3D representations, that leverages depth-aligned images generated from point cloud-projected depth maps. Unlike CAD-rendered images, our generated images provide rich, realistic color and texture diversity while preserving geometric and semantic consistency with the depth maps. OpenDlign also optimizes depth map projection and integrates depth-specific text prompts, improving 2D VLM knowledge adaptation for 3D learning efficient fine-tuning. Experimental results show that OpenDlign significantly outperforms existing benchmarks in zero-shot and few-shot 3D tasks, exceeding prior scores by 8.0% on ModelNet40 and 16.4% on OmniObject3D with just 6 million tuned parameters. Moreover, integrating generated depth-aligned images into existing 3D learning pipelines consistently improves their performance.

Match-Stereo-Videos: Bidirectional Alignment for Consistent Dynamic Stereo Matching

Dynamic stereo matching is the task of estimating consistent disparities from stereo videos with dynamic objects. Recent learning-based methods prioritize optimal performance on a single stereo pair, resulting in temporal inconsistencies. Existing video methods apply per-frame matching and window-based cost aggregation across the time dimension, leading to low-frequency oscillations at the scale of the window size. Towards this challenge, we develop a bidirectional alignment mechanism for adjacent frames as a fundamental operation. We further propose a novel framework, BiDAStereo, that achieves consistent dynamic stereo matching. Unlike the existing methods, we model this task as local matching and global aggregation. Locally, we consider correlation in a triple-frame manner to pool information from adjacent frames and improve the temporal consistency. Globally, to exploit the entire sequence's consistency and extract dynamic scene cues for aggregation, we develop a motion-propagation recurrent unit. Extensive experiments demonstrate the performance of our method, showcasing improvements in prediction quality and achieving state-of-the-art results on various commonly used benchmarks.

Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Warping for Robust and Efficient Stereo Matching

Correlation based stereo matching has achieved outstanding performance, which pursues cost volume between two feature maps. Unfortunately, current methods with a fixed model do not work uniformly well across various datasets, greatly limiting their real-world applicability. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a new perspective to dynamically calculate correlation for robust stereo matching. A novel Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Correlation (UGAC) module is introduced to robustly adapt the same model for different scenarios. Specifically, a variance-based uncertainty estimation is employed to adaptively adjust the sampling area during warping operation. Additionally, we improve the traditional non-parametric warping with learnable parameters, such that the position-specific weights can be learned. We show that by empowering the recurrent network with the UGAC module, stereo matching can be exploited more robustly and effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance over the ETH3D, KITTI, and Middlebury datasets when employing the same fixed model over these datasets without any retraining procedure. To target real-time applications, we further design a lightweight model based on UGAC, which also outperforms other methods over KITTI benchmarks with only 0.6 M parameters.