# GA-Net: Guided Aggregation Net for End-to-end Stereo Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.06587 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06587/

## Key facts

- Cited by 244 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 244)

- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [Practical Stereo Matching via Cascaded Recurrent Network with Adaptive Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11483/) (2022)
- [The Temporal Opportunist: Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14540/) (2021)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [Splatt3R: Zero-shot Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13912/) (2024)
- [FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09898/) (2025)
- [Spring: A High-Resolution High-Detail Dataset and Benchmark for Scene Flow, Optical Flow and Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01943/) (2023)
- [CFNet: Cascade and Fused Cost Volume for Robust Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04314/) (2021)
- [DynamicStereo: Consistent Dynamic Depth from Stereo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02296/) (2023)
- [Attention Concatenation Volume for Accurate and Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02146/) (2022)
- [QuadTree Attention for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02767/) (2022)
- [SMD-Nets: Stereo Mixture Density Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03866/) (2021)
- [Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00486/) (2024)
- [Stereo4D: Learning How Things Move in 3D from Internet Stereo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09621/) (2024)
- [SimpleRecon: 3D Reconstruction Without 3D Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14743/) (2022)
- [MobileStereoNet: Towards Lightweight Deep Networks for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09770/) (2021)
- [LIGA-Stereo: Learning LiDAR Geometry Aware Representations for Stereo-based 3D Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08258/) (2021)
- [GS2Mesh: Surface Reconstruction from Gaussian Splatting via Novel Stereo Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01810/) (2024)
- [Accurate and Efficient Stereo Matching via Attention Concatenation Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12699/) (2022)
- [IGEV++: Iterative Multi-range Geometry Encoding Volumes for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00638/) (2024)
- [CamLiFlow: Bidirectional Camera-LiDAR Fusion for Joint Optical Flow and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10502/) (2021)
- [STS: Surround-view Temporal Stereo for Multi-view 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10145/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Normalization for Robust Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09670/) (2022)
- [DEFOM-Stereo: Depth Foundation Model Based Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09466/) (2025)
- [Open Challenges in Deep Stereo: the Booster Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04671/) (2022)
- [MoCha-Stereo: Motif Channel Attention Network for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06842/) (2024)
- [Correlate-and-Excite: Real-Time Stereo Matching via Guided Cost Volume Excitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05773/) (2021)
- [Stereo Anywhere: Robust Zero-Shot Deep Stereo Matching Even Where Either Stereo or Mono Fail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04472/) (2024)
- [Bilateral Grid Learning for Stereo Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01601/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the stereo matching task, matching cost aggregation is crucial in both traditional methods and deep neural network models in order to accurately estimate disparities. We propose two novel neural net layers, aimed at capturing local and the whole-image cost dependencies respectively. The first is a semi-global aggregation layer which is a differentiable approximation of the semi-global matching, the second is the local guided aggregation layer which follows a traditional cost filtering strategy to refine thin structures. These two layers can be used to replace the widely used 3D convolutional layer which is computationally costly and memory-consuming as it has cubic computational/memory complexity. In the experiments, we show that nets with a two-layer guided aggregation block easily outperform the state-of-the-art GC-Net which has nineteen 3D convolutional layers. We also train a deep guided aggregation network (GA-Net) which gets better accuracies than state-of-the-art methods on both Scene Flow dataset and KITTI benchmarks.