# Adaptive Unimodal Cost Volume Filtering for Deep Stereo Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.03751 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03751/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [CFNet: Cascade and Fused Cost Volume for Robust Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04314/) (2021)
- [Attention Concatenation Volume for Accurate and Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02146/) (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)
- [Rethinking Depth Estimation for Multi-View Stereo: A Unified Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01501/) (2022)
- [Efficient Region-Aware Neural Radiance Fields for High-Fidelity Talking Portrait Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09323/) (2023)
- [LIGA-Stereo: Learning LiDAR Geometry Aware Representations for Stereo-based 3D Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08258/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Revisiting Domain Generalized Stereo Matching Networks from a Feature Consistency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10887/) (2022)
- [DiffuStereo: High Quality Human Reconstruction via Diffusion-based Stereo Using Sparse Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08000/) (2022)
- [ITSA: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Automatic Shortcut Avoidance and Domain Generalization in Stereo Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02263/) (2022)
- [YOLOStereo3D: A Step Back to 2D for Efficient Stereo 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09422/) (2021)
- [Local Similarity Pattern and Cost Self-Reassembling for Deep Stereo Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01011/) (2021)
- [OpenStereo: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Stereo Matching and Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00343/) (2023)
- [PVStereo: Pyramid Voting Module for End-to-End Self-Supervised Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07094/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Deep Stereo Matching in the Twenties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07816/) (2024)
- [Digging Into Uncertainty-based Pseudo-label for Robust Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16509/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Multi-Modal Cross-Entropy Loss for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15612/) (2023)
- [CGI-Stereo: Accurate and Real-Time Stereo Matching via Context and Geometry Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02789/) (2023)
- [DiffuVolume: Diffusion Model for Volume based Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15989/) (2023)
- [Robust Synthetic-to-Real Transfer for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07705/) (2024)
- [One at a Time: Progressive Multi-step Volumetric Probability Learning for Reliable 3D Scene Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12681/) (2023)
- [TemporalStereo: Efficient Spatial-Temporal Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13755/) (2022)
- [BANet: Bilateral Aggregation Network for Mobile Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03259/) (2025)
- [Digging into Depth Priors for Outdoor Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04413/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art deep learning based stereo matching approaches treat disparity estimation as a regression problem, where loss function is directly defined on true disparities and their estimated ones. However, disparity is just a byproduct of a matching process modeled by cost volume, while indirectly learning cost volume driven by disparity regression is prone to overfitting since the cost volume is under constrained. In this paper, we propose to directly add constraints to the cost volume by filtering cost volume with unimodal distribution peaked at true disparities. In addition, variances of the unimodal distributions for each pixel are estimated to explicitly model matching uncertainty under different contexts. The proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on Scene Flow and two KITTI stereo benchmarks. In particular, our method ranked the 1st place of KITTI 2012 evaluation and the 4th place of KITTI 2015 evaluation (recorded on 2019.8.20). The codes of AcfNet are available at: https://github.com/DeepMotionAIResearch/DenseMatchingBenchmark.