MonSter: Marry Monodepth to Stereo Unleashes Power

Stereo matching recovers depth from image correspondences. Existing methods struggle to handle ill-posed regions with limited matching cues, such as occlusions and textureless areas. To address this, we propose MonSter, a novel method that leverages the complementary strengths of monocular depth estimation and stereo matching. MonSter integrates monocular depth and stereo matching into a dual-branch architecture to iteratively improve each other. Confidence-based guidance adaptively selects reliable stereo cues for monodepth scale-shift recovery. The refined monodepth is in turn guides stereo effectively at ill-posed regions. Such iterative mutual enhancement enables MonSter to evolve monodepth priors from coarse object-level structures to pixel-level geometry, fully unlocking the potential of stereo matching. As shown in Fig.1, MonSter ranks 1st across five most commonly used leaderboards -- SceneFlow, KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, Middlebury, and ETH3D. Achieving up to 49.5% improvements (Bad 1.0 on ETH3D) over the previous best method. Comprehensive analysis verifies the effectiveness of MonSter in ill-posed regions. In terms of zero-shot generalization, MonSter significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art across the board. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Junda24/MonSter.

FlowDA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Framework for Optical Flow Estimation

Collecting real-world optical flow datasets is a formidable challenge due to the high cost of labeling. A shortage of datasets significantly constrains the real-world performance of optical flow models. Building virtual datasets that resemble real scenarios offers a potential solution for performance enhancement, yet a domain gap separates virtual and real datasets. This paper introduces FlowDA, an unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) framework for optical flow estimation. FlowDA employs a UDA architecture based on mean-teacher and integrates concepts and techniques in unsupervised optical flow estimation. Furthermore, an Adaptive Curriculum Weighting (ACW) module based on curriculum learning is proposed to enhance the training effectiveness. Experimental outcomes demonstrate that our FlowDA outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised optical flow estimation method SMURF by 21.6%, real optical flow dataset generation method MPI-Flow by 27.8%, and optical flow estimation adaptive method FlowSupervisor by 30.9%, offering novel insights for enhancing the performance of optical flow estimation in real-world scenarios. The code will be open-sourced after the publication of this paper.

MC-Stereo: Multi-peak Lookup and Cascade Search Range for Stereo Matching

Stereo matching is a fundamental task in scene comprehension. In recent years, the method based on iterative optimization has shown promise in stereo matching. However, the current iteration framework employs a single-peak lookup, which struggles to handle the multi-peak problem effectively. Additionally, the fixed search range used during the iteration process limits the final convergence effects. To address these issues, we present a novel iterative optimization architecture called MC-Stereo. This architecture mitigates the multi-peak distribution problem in matching through the multi-peak lookup strategy, and integrates the coarse-to-fine concept into the iterative framework via the cascade search range. Furthermore, given that feature representation learning is crucial for successful learnbased stereo matching, we introduce a pre-trained network to serve as the feature extractor, enhancing the front end of the stereo matching pipeline. Based on these improvements, MC-Stereo ranks first among all publicly available methods on the KITTI-2012 and KITTI-2015 benchmarks, and also achieves state-of-the-art performance on ETH3D. The code will be open sourced after the publication of this paper.