Domain Generalized Stereo Matching with Uncertainty-guided Data Augmentation
This addresses domain generalization for stereo matching, which is incremental as it builds on existing data augmentation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of stereo matching models failing to generalize from synthetic to real data due to domain differences, and proposes an uncertainty-guided data augmentation method that improves generalization performance on several benchmarks.
State-of-the-art stereo matching (SM) models trained on synthetic data often fail to generalize to real data domains due to domain differences, such as color, illumination, contrast, and texture. To address this challenge, we leverage data augmentation to expand the training domain, encouraging the model to acquire robust cross-domain feature representations instead of domain-dependent shortcuts. This paper proposes an uncertainty-guided data augmentation (UgDA) method, which argues that the image statistics in RGB space (mean and standard deviation) carry the domain characteristics. Thus, samples in unseen domains can be generated by properly perturbing these statistics. Furthermore, to simulate more potential domains, Gaussian distributions founded on batch-level statistics are poposed to model the unceratinty of perturbation direction and intensity. Additionally, we further enforce feature consistency between original and augmented data for the same scene, encouraging the model to learn structure aware, shortcuts-invariant feature representations. Our approach is simple, architecture-agnostic, and can be integrated into any SM networks. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks have demonstrated that our method can significantly improve the generalization performance of existing SM networks.