DSNet: Joint Learning for Scene Segmentation and Disparity Estimation

Recently, research works have attempted the joint prediction of scene semantics and optical flow estimation, which demonstrate the mutual improvement between both tasks. Besides, the depth information is also indispensable for the scene understanding, and disparity estimation is necessary for outputting dense depth maps. Such task shares a great similarity with the optical flow estimation since they can all be cast into a problem of capturing the difference at a location of two image frames. However, as far as we know, currently there are few networks for the joint learning of semantic and disparity. Moreover, since deep semantic information and disparity feature maps can learn from each other, we find it unnecessary with two independent encoding modules to separately extract semantic and disparity features. Therefore, we propose a unified multi-tasking architecture DSNet, for the simultaneous estimation of semantic and disparity information. In our model, semantic features, extracted by the encoding module ResNet from the left and right images, are used to obtain the deep disparity features via a novel matching module which performs pixel-to-pixel matching. In addition, we also use the disparity map to perform warp operation on deep features of the right image to deal with the problem of lacking of semantic labels. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by extensive experiments.