Unsupervised Learning of Stereo Vision with Monocular Depth Cues

We demonstrate unsupervised learning of a stereo vision model involving monocular depth cues (shape from texture cues). We formulate a conditional probability model defining the probability of the right image given the left. This conditional model does not model a probability distribution over images. Maximizing conditional liklihood rather than joint liklihood is similar using a CRF (Conditional Random Field, [6]) rather than an MRF (joint Markov Random Field). The most closely related earlier work seems to be that of Zhang and Seitz [8] who give a method for adapting five parameters of a stereo vision model. In contrast we train highly parameterized monocular depth cues. Also, we avoid the need for independence assumptions through the use of contrastive divergence training — a general method for optimizing CRFs [4]. There is also related work by Saxena et al. on supervised learning of highly parameterized monocular depth cues [1, 2]. Unlike Saxena et al. we train monocular depth cues as part of unsupervised training of a stereo algorithm. Other related work includes that of Scharstein and Pal [7] and Kong and Tao [5] who perform supervised training of stereo algorithms using general CRF methods. We focus on histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features as a (texture) surface orientation cue. As a surface is tilted away from the camera the edges in the direction of the tilt become foreshortened while the edges orthogonal to the tilt are not. The effect on the edge distribution is shown in the image below where the average HOG feature is shown for regions of tree trunk and forest floor. The cylindrical shape of the tree trunk is clearly indicated by the warping of the HOG feature.