Stacking learning with coalesced cost filtering for accurate stereo matching

Deep learning based stereo matching algorithms have produced impressive disparity estimation for recent years; and the success of them has once overshadowed the conventional ones. In this paper, we intend to reverse this inferiority, by leveraging Stacking Learning with Coalesced Cost Filtering to make the conventional algorithms achieve or even surpass the results of deep learning ones. Four classical and Discriminative Dictionary Learning (DDL) algorithms are adopted as base-models for Stacking. For the former ones, four classical stereo matching algorithms are employed and regarded as 'Coalesced Cost Filtering Module'; for the latter supervised learning one, we utilize the Discriminative Dictionary Learning (DDL) stereo matching algorithm. Then three categories of features are extracted from the predictions of base-models to train the meta-model. For the meta-model (final classifier) of Stacking, the Random Forest (RF) classifier is selected. In addition, we also employ an advanced one-view disparity refinement strategy to compute the final refined results more efficiently. Performance evaluations on Middlebury v.2 and v.3 stereo data sets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other four most challenging stereo matching algorithms. Besides, the submitted online results even show better results than deep learning ones.