VHS: High-Resolution Iterative Stereo Matching with Visual Hull Priors

Abstract

We present a stereo-matching method for depth estimation from high-resolution images using visual hulls as priors and a memory-efficient technique for the correlation computation. Our method uses object masks extracted from supplementary views of the scene to guide the disparity estimation effectively reducing the search space for matches. This approach is specifically tailored to stereo rigs in volumetric capture systems where an accurate depth plays a key role in the downstream reconstruction task. To enable training and regression at high resolutions targeted by recent systems our approach extends a sparse correlation computation into a hybrid sparse-dense scheme suitable for application in leading recurrent network architectures. We evaluate the performance-efficiency trade-off of our method compared to state-of-the-art approaches and demonstrate the efficacy of the visual hull guidance. In addition we propose a training scheme for a further reduction of memory requirements during optimization facilitating training on high-resolution data.