StereoDiffuer: Diffusion-based Progressive Geometry Modeling with Saliency Attention Perception for Stereo Matching

Abstract

With the advance of deep neural networks, the quality of disparity maps obtained through stereo matching has steadily improved. However, existing stereo matching methods still struggle to preserve fine-grained geometric details, resulting in blurred edges and over-smoothed predictions in challenging regions. To address these limitations, we propose StereoDiffuer, an iterative diffusion-based stereo matching framework that explicitly models geometric details and progressively refines disparity estimates. The framework incorporates a Saliency Attention Perception (SAP) module to extract salient geometric cues, including object boundaries, thin structures, and sharp edges. Confidence-guided SAP features are combined with the initial disparity estimate to condition an iterative denoising diffusion process, which corrects residual disparity errors and restores geometric details suppressed during cost-volume regularization and upsampling. Experimental results on the Scene Flow and KITTI benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and its competitive performance relative to the compared stereo matching methods.

17 pages, 9 figures, and 11 tables. Accepted by Signal Processing: Image Communication