# SCV-Stereo: Learning Stereo Matching from a Sparse Cost Volume

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08187 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08187/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Learning of Geometry and Context for Deep Stereo Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04309/) (2017)
- [GA-Net: Guided Aggregation Net for End-to-end Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06587/) (2019)
- [Group-wise Correlation Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04025/) (2019)
- [SNE-RoadSeg: Incorporating Surface Normal Information into Semantic Segmentation for Accurate Freespace Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11351/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Unimodal Cost Volume Filtering for Deep Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03751/) (2019)
- [Learning Optical Flow from a Few Matches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02166/) (2021)
- [Road surface 3d reconstruction based on dense subpixel disparity map estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01874/) (2018)
- [PVStereo: Pyramid Voting Module for End-to-End Self-Supervised Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07094/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Fusion Module Evolves Drivable Area and Road Anomaly Detection: A Benchmark and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02433/) (2021)
- [Applying Surface Normal Information in Drivable Area and Road Anomaly Detection for Ground Mobile Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11383/) (2020)
- [Learning Collision-Free Space Detection from Stereo Images: Homography Matrix Brings Better Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07890/) (2020)
- [Self-Supervised Drivable Area and Road Anomaly Segmentation using RGB-D Data for Robotic Wheelchairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05950/) (2020)
- [Computer Stereo Vision for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03194/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DCVSMNet: Double Cost Volume Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16473/) (2024)
- [VHS: High-Resolution Iterative Stereo Matching with Visual Hull Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02552/) (2024)
- [RGB-Phase Speckle: Cross-Scene Stereo 3D Reconstruction via Wrapped Pre-Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06125/) (2025)
- [StereoDiffuer: Diffusion-based Progressive Geometry Modeling with Saliency Attention Perception for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21710/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based stereo matching approaches generally require a dense cost volume (DCV) for disparity estimation. However, generating such cost volumes is computationally-intensive and memory-consuming, hindering CNN training and inference efficiency. To address this problem, we propose SCV-Stereo, a novel CNN architecture, capable of learning dense stereo matching from sparse cost volume (SCV) representations. Our inspiration is derived from the fact that DCV representations are somewhat redundant and can be replaced with SCV representations. Benefiting from these SCV representations, our SCV-Stereo can update disparity estimations in an iterative fashion for accurate and efficient stereo matching. Extensive experiments carried out on the KITTI Stereo benchmarks demonstrate that our SCV-Stereo can significantly minimize the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for stereo matching. Our project page is https://sites.google.com/view/scv-stereo.