text: We present a method for extracting depth information from a rectified image pair. We train a convolutional neural network to predict how well two image patches match and use it to compute the stereo matching cost. The cost is refined by cross-based cost aggregation and semiglobal matching, followed by a left-right consistency check to eliminate errors in the occluded regions. Our stereo method achieves an error rate of 2.61 on the KITTI stereo dataset and is currently (August 2014) the top performing method on this dataset.
  @cite_1: While machine learning has been instrumental to the ongoing progress in most areas of computer vision, it has not been applied to the problem of stereo matching with similar frequency or success. We present a supervised learning approach for predicting the correctness of stereo matches based on a random forest and a set of features that capture various forms of information about each pixel. We show highly competitive results in predicting the correctness of matches and in confidence estimation, which allows us to rank pixels according to the reliability of their assigned disparities. Moreover, we show how these confidence values can be used to improve the accuracy of disparity maps by integrating them with an MRF-based stereo algorithm. This is an important distinction from current literature that has mainly focused on sparsification by removing potentially erroneous disparities to generate quasi-dense disparity maps.
  @cite_3: With the aim to improve accuracy of stereo confidence measures, we apply the random decision forest framework to a large set of diverse stereo confidence measures. Learning and testing sets were drawn from the recently introduced KITTI dataset, which currently poses higher challenges to stereo solvers than other benchmarks with ground truth for stereo evaluation. We experiment with semi global matching stereo (SGM) and a census data term, which is the best performing real-time capable stereo method known to date. On KITTI images, SGM still produces a significant amount of error. We obtain consistently improved area under curve values of sparsification measures in comparison to best performing single stereo confidence measures where numbers of stereo errors are large. More specifically, our method performs best in all but one out of 194 frames of the KITTI dataset.
summary: Recent work @cite_3 @cite_1 focused on estimating the confidence of the computed matching cost. used a random forest classifier to combine several confidence measures. Similarly, trained a random forest classifier to predict the confidence of the matching cost and used the predictions as soft constraints in a Markov random field to decrease the error of the stereo method.