# Correlate-and-Excite: Real-Time Stereo Matching via Guided Cost Volume Excitation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.05773 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05773/

## Key facts

- Cited by 47 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06378/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Deep Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13501/) (2020)
- [A Convolutional Neural Network for Modelling Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.2188/) (2014)
- [Stereo Matching by Training a Convolutional Neural Network to Compare Image Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.05970/) (2015)
- [Learning Depth with Convolutional Spatial Propagation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02695/) (2018)
- [DeepPruner: Learning Efficient Stereo Matching via Differentiable PatchMatch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05845/) (2019)
- [Depth Estimation via Affinity Learned with Convolutional Spatial Propagation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00150/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Discrete Distribution Decomposition for Match Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06264/) (2018)
- [StereoNet: Guided Hierarchical Refinement for Real-Time Edge-Aware Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08865/) (2018)
- [SegStereo: Exploiting Semantic Information for Disparity Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11699/) (2018)
- [Superpixel Segmentation with Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12929/) (2020)
- [Cascade Residual Learning: A Two-stage Convolutional Neural Network for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.09204/) (2017)
- [Learning Monocular Depth in Dynamic Scenes via Instance-Aware Projection Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02629/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Unimodal Cost Volume Filtering for Deep Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03751/) (2019)
- [EdgeStereo: An Effective Multi-Task Learning Network for Stereo Matching and Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01700/) (2019)
- [Wasserstein Distances for Stereo Disparity Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03085/) (2020)
- [Practical Deep Stereo (PDS): Toward applications-friendly deep stereo matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01677/) (2018)
- [Learning Residual Flow as Dynamic Motion from Stereo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06999/) (2019)
- [Visuomotor Understanding for Representation Learning of Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06979/) (2019)
- [Do End-to-end Stereo Algorithms Under-utilize Information?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07350/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Stereo Anywhere: Robust Zero-Shot Deep Stereo Matching Even Where Either Stereo or Mono Fail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04472/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Warping for Robust and Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14071/) (2023)
- [OpenStereo: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Stereo Matching and Strong Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00343/) (2023)
- [LightStereo: Channel Boost Is All You Need for Efficient 2D Cost Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19833/) (2024)
- [Fast-FoundationStereo: Real-Time Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11130/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Deep Stereo Matching in the Twenties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07816/) (2024)
- [MonSter++: Unified Stereo Matching, Multi-view Stereo, and Real-time Stereo with Monodepth Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08643/) (2025)
- [CGI-Stereo: Accurate and Real-Time Stereo Matching via Context and Geometry Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02789/) (2023)
- [DualRefine: Self-Supervised Depth and Pose Estimation Through Iterative Epipolar Sampling and Refinement Toward Equilibrium](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03560/) (2023)
- [Stereo Matching in Time: 100+ FPS Video Stereo Matching for Extended Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04183/) (2023)
- [TemporalStereo: Efficient Spatial-Temporal Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13755/) (2022)
- [Federated Online Adaptation for Deep Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14873/) (2024)
- [BANet: Bilateral Aggregation Network for Mobile Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03259/) (2025)
- [PromptStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching via Structure and Motion Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01650/) (2026)
- [Stereo Anything: Unifying Zero-shot Stereo Matching with Large-Scale Mixed Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.14053/) (2024)
- [Global Regulation and Excitation via Attention Tuning for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15891/) (2025)
- [Lite Any Stereo: Efficient Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16555/) (2025)
- [DCVSMNet: Double Cost Volume Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16473/) (2024)
- [Boosting Zero-shot Stereo Matching using Large-scale Mixed Images Sources in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08607/) (2025)
- [MAFNet:Multi-frequency Adaptive Fusion Network for Real-time Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04358/) (2025)
- [VHS: High-Resolution Iterative Stereo Matching with Visual Hull Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02552/) (2024)
- [The Sampling-Gaussian for stereo matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06527/) (2024)
- [Channel-wise Motion Features for Efficient Motion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13082/) (2025)
- [Iterative Volume Fusion for Asymmetric Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09543/) (2025)
- [RobIA: Robust Instance-aware Continual Test-time Adaptation for Deep Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10107/) (2025)
- [Humanoid-OmniOcc: Stereo-Based Full-View Occupancy Dataset for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22971/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Volumetric deep learning approach towards stereo matching aggregates a cost volume computed from input left and right images using 3D convolutions. Recent works showed that utilization of extracted image features and a spatially varying cost volume aggregation complements 3D convolutions. However, existing methods with spatially varying operations are complex, cost considerable computation time, and cause memory consumption to increase. In this work, we construct Guided Cost volume Excitation (GCE) and show that simple channel excitation of cost volume guided by image can improve performance considerably. Moreover, we propose a novel method of using top-k selection prior to soft-argmin disparity regression for computing the final disparity estimate. Combining our novel contributions, we present an end-to-end network that we call Correlate-and-Excite (CoEx). Extensive experiments of our model on the SceneFlow, KITTI 2012, and KITTI 2015 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our model and show that our model outperforms other speed-based algorithms while also being competitive to other state-of-the-art algorithms. Codes will be made available at https://github.com/antabangun/coex.