Joint Disparity Estimation and Pseudo NIR Generation From Cross Spectral Image Pairs

Cross spectral stereo matching is a challenging task due to different spectral properties causing unreliable results in correspondence estimation. In this paper, we propose joint disparity estimation and pseudo near infrared (NIR) generation from cross spectral image pairs. To bridge the spectral gap between paired images, we adopt differential map operations and non-local blocks to improve the local attention and global attention of the network. The proposed network is based on unsupervised learning that consists of one encoder and two decoders, which performs both spectral translation and disparity estimation. For cooperative learning, we use difference map operation to connect two decoders, thus improving the inference ability of the decoder in regions even with large spectral differences. Experimental results show that the proposed network achieves good performance in cross spectral stereo matching for unreliable regions such as shadows and glasses. Moreover, the proposed network generates pseudo NIR images nearly the same as the ground truth even in the regions with large spectral difference. Besides, we achieve real-time speed of 27 FPS for $582\times 429$ image pairs on RTX 2060 6G GPU due to the low computational complexity.