FoggyStereo: Stereo Matching with Fog Volume Representation

Stereo matching in foggy scenes is challenging as the scattering effect of fog blurs the image and makes the matching ambiguous. Prior methods deem the fog as noise and discard it before matching. Different from them, we propose to explore depth hints from fog and improve stereo matching via these hints. The exploration of depth hints is designed from the perspective of rendering. The rendering is conducted by reversing the atmospheric scattering process and removing the fog within a selected depth range. The quality of the rendered image reflects the correctness of the selected depth, as the closer it is to the real depth, the clearer the rendered image is. We introduce a fog volume representation to collect these depth hints from the fog. We construct the fog volume by stacking images rendered with depths computed from disparity candidates that are also used to build the cost volume. We fuse the fog volume with cost volume to rectify the ambiguous matching caused by fog. Experiments show that our fog volume representation significantly promotes the SOTA result on foggy scenes by 10% ~ 30% while maintaining a comparable performance in clear scenes.