# Stereo Risk: A Continuous Modeling Approach to Stereo Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03152 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03152/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [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)
- [AANet: Adaptive Aggregation Network for Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09548/) (2020)
- [Practical Stereo Matching via Cascaded Recurrent Network with Adaptive Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11483/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Stereo Depth Estimation From a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02910/) (2020)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Deep Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13501/) (2020)
- [CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10408/) (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)
- [HITNet: Hierarchical Iterative Tile Refinement Network for Real-time Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12140/) (2020)
- [SMD-Nets: Stereo Mixture Density Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03866/) (2021)
- [DeepPruner: Learning Efficient Stereo Matching via Differentiable PatchMatch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05845/) (2019)
- [Domain-invariant Stereo Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13287/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Depth Estimation for Multi-View Stereo: A Unified Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01501/) (2022)
- [Real-time self-adaptive deep stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05424/) (2018)
- [Computing the Stereo Matching Cost with a Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4326/) (2014)
- [PCW-Net: Pyramid Combination and Warping Cost Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12797/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [IGEV++: Iterative Multi-range Geometry Encoding Volumes for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00638/) (2024)
- [BANet: Bilateral Aggregation Network for Mobile Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03259/) (2025)
- [Motif Channel Opened in a White-Box: Stereo Matching via Motif Correlation Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12426/) (2024)
- [Hadamard Attention Recurrent Transformer: A Strong Baseline for Stereo Matching Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01023/) (2025)
- [Evidential Transformers for Improved Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01082/) (2024)
- [MIDAS: Modeling Ground-Truth Distributions with Dark Knowledge for Domain Generalized Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04376/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Stereo Risk, a new deep-learning approach to solve the classical stereo-matching problem in computer vision. As it is well-known that stereo matching boils down to a per-pixel disparity estimation problem, the popular state-of-the-art stereo-matching approaches widely rely on regressing the scene disparity values, yet via discretization of scene disparity values. Such discretization often fails to capture the nuanced, continuous nature of scene depth. Stereo Risk departs from the conventional discretization approach by formulating the scene disparity as an optimal solution to a continuous risk minimization problem, hence the name "stereo risk". We demonstrate that L1 minimization of the proposed continuous risk function enhances stereo-matching performance for deep networks, particularly for disparities with multi-modal probability distributions. Furthermore, to enable the end-to-end network training of the non-differentiable L1 risk optimization, we exploited the implicit function theorem, ensuring a fully differentiable network. A comprehensive analysis demonstrates our method's theoretical soundness and superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods across various benchmark datasets, including KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, ETH3D, SceneFlow, and Middlebury 2014.