# Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Deep Stereo Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.13501 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13501/

## Key facts

- Cited by 166 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 166)

- [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)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [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)
- [CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10408/) (2022)
- [CroCo: Self-Supervised Pre-training for 3D Vision Tasks by Cross-View Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10716/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00486/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Slimmable Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13258/) (2021)
- [LIGA-Stereo: Learning LiDAR Geometry Aware Representations for Stereo-based 3D Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08258/) (2021)
- [EndoSurf: Neural Surface Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues with Stereo Endoscope Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11307/) (2023)
- [BossNAS: Exploring Hybrid CNN-transformers with Block-wisely Self-supervised Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12424/) (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)
- [ARVo: Learning All-Range Volumetric Correspondence for Video Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04260/) (2021)
- [iDARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search with Stochastic Implicit Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10784/) (2021)
- [RGB-D Saliency Detection via Cascaded Mutual Information Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07246/) (2021)
- [Flare7K: A Phenomenological Nighttime Flare Removal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06570/) (2022)
- [Open Challenges in Deep Stereo: the Booster Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04671/) (2022)
- [Correlate-and-Excite: Real-Time Stereo Matching via Guided Cost Volume Excitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05773/) (2021)
- [NeRF-Supervised Deep Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17603/) (2023)
- [GraftNet: Towards Domain Generalized Stereo Matching with a Broad-Spectrum and Task-Oriented Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00179/) (2022)
- [Neural Markov Random Field for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11193/) (2024)
- [Deep Two-View Structure-from-Motion Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00556/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Warping for Robust and Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14071/) (2023)
- [Learning Depth Estimation for Transparent and Mirror Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15052/) (2023)
- [Booster: a Benchmark for Depth from Images of Specular and Transparent Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08245/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To reduce the human efforts in neural network design, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been applied with remarkable success to various high-level vision tasks such as classification and semantic segmentation. The underlying idea for the NAS algorithm is straightforward, namely, to enable the network the ability to choose among a set of operations (e.g., convolution with different filter sizes), one is able to find an optimal architecture that is better adapted to the problem at hand. However, so far the success of NAS has not been enjoyed by low-level geometric vision tasks such as stereo matching. This is partly due to the fact that state-of-the-art deep stereo matching networks, designed by humans, are already sheer in size. Directly applying the NAS to such massive structures is computationally prohibitive based on the currently available mainstream computing resources. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end hierarchical NAS framework for deep stereo matching by incorporating task-specific human knowledge into the neural architecture search framework. Specifically, following the gold standard pipeline for deep stereo matching (i.e., feature extraction -- feature volume construction and dense matching), we optimize the architectures of the entire pipeline jointly. Extensive experiments show that our searched network outperforms all state-of-the-art deep stereo matching architectures and is ranked at the top 1 accuracy on KITTI stereo 2012, 2015 and Middlebury benchmarks, as well as the top 1 on SceneFlow dataset with a substantial improvement on the size of the network and the speed of inference. The code is available at https://github.com/XuelianCheng/LEAStereo.