Learning to Detect Ground Control Points for Improving the Accuracy of Stereo Matching

While machine learning has been instrumental to the ongoing progress in most areas of computer vision, it has not been applied to the problem of stereo matching with similar frequency or success. We present a supervised learning approach for predicting the correctness of stereo matches based on a random forest and a set of features that capture various forms of information about each pixel. We show highly competitive results in predicting the correctness of matches and in confidence estimation, which allows us to rank pixels according to the reliability of their assigned disparities. Moreover, we show how these confidence values can be used to improve the accuracy of disparity maps by integrating them with an MRF-based stereo algorithm. This is an important distinction from current literature that has mainly focused on sparsification by removing potentially erroneous disparities to generate quasi-dense disparity maps.