Occlusion-Aware Self-Supervised Stereo Matching with Confidence Guided Raw Disparity Fusion

Commercially available stereo cameras used in robots and other intelligent systems to obtain depth information typically rely on traditional stereo matching algorithms. Although their raw (predicted) disparity maps contain incorrect estimates, these algorithms can still provide useful prior information towards more accurate prediction. We propose a pipeline to incorporate this prior information to produce more accurate disparity maps. The proposed pipeline includes a confidence generation component to identify raw disparity inaccuracies as well as a self-supervised deep neural network (DNN) to predict disparity and compute the corresponding occlusion masks. The proposed DNN consists of a feature extraction module, a confidence guided raw disparity fusion module to generate an initial disparity map, and a hierarchical occlusion-aware disparity refinement module to compute the final estimates. Experimental results on public datasets verify that the proposed pipeline has competitive accuracy with real-time processing rate. We also test the pipeline with images captured by commercial stereo cameras to show its effectiveness in improving their raw disparity estimates.