Displets: Resolving Stereo Ambiguities using Object Knowledge
Fatma Güney
MPI Tübingen

Andreas Geiger
MPI Tübingenfatma.guney@tue.mpg.deandreas.geiger@tue.mpg.de

Abstract0

Stereo techniques have witnessed tremendous progressover the last decades, yet some aspects of the problem still
remain challenging today. Striking examples are reflecting and textureless surfaces which cannot easily be recovered using traditional local regularizers. In this paper, wetherefore propose to regularize over larger distances using object-category specific disparity proposals (displets)
which we sample using inverse graphics techniques basedon a sparse disparity estimate and a semantic segmentationof the image. The proposed displets encode the fact that
objects of certain categories are not arbitrarily shaped but
typically exhibit regular structures. We integrate them as
non-local regularizer for the challenging object class ’car’
into a superpixel based CRF framework and demonstrate
its benefits on the KITTI stereo evaluation. At time of submission, our approach ranks first across all KITTI stereo
leaderboards.

160

Figure 1: Resolving Stereo Matching Ambiguities: Current state-of-the-art stereo methods often fail at reflecting,textureless or semi-transparent surfaces (top, [68]). By using object knowledge, we encourage disparities to agreewith plausible surfaces (center). This improves results bothquantitatively and qualitatively while simultaneously recovering the 3D geometry of the objects in the scene (bottom).

1. Introduction“In many cases it is sufficient to know or conjecture thatan object exhibits certain regularities in order to correctlyinterpret its perspective image as a 3D shape.”
Hermann von Helmholtz, 1867

central role. Thus how important are Helmholtz’s early observations [59] for binocular stereo matching after all?
In this paper we investigate the utility of mid-level processes such as object recognition and semantic segmentation for stereo matching. In particular, we focus our attention on the reconstruction of well-defined objects for which
the data term is weak and current methods perform poorly,
such as cars. Due to their textureless, reflective and semitransparent nature, those object categories represent a major challenge for current state-of-the-art algorithms, as illustrated in Fig. 1 (top). While the reconstruction of purely
specular surfaces has been successfully demonstrated using
multiple frames [21,62], such techniques are hard to employ
in our setting due to the superposition of several deteriorating visual effects in real-world scenes.

Since David Marr’s influential investigations into the human representation and processing of visual information[40], stereo matching has been considered primarily a lowlevel process that builds upon bottom-up representations
like Marr’s primal sketch. And indeed, the vast majorityof binocular stereo matching algorithms that have been proposed in the literature rely on low-level features in combination with relatively simple first or second order smoothness assumptions about the world. Little is known about theimportance of recognition for this problem and the leading
entries in current benchmarks such as Middlebury [50] or
KITTI [13] even completely ignore semantic information.
This is in stark contrast to current trends in single image
reconstruction [8, 19, 32, 35, 49] where recognition plays a

In contrast, as humans we are able to effortlessly extract
information about the geometry of cars even from a single
1

image thanks to our object knowledge and shape representation. Inspired by this fact, we introduce object knowledge
for well-constrained object categories into a slanted-plane
MRF and estimate a dense disparity map. Towards thisgoal, we leverage semantic information and inverse graphics to sample a set of plausible object disparity maps given
an initial semi-dense disparity estimate. We encourage thepresence of these 2.5D shape samples (or “displets”) in our
MRF formulation depending on how much their geometry
and semantic class agrees with the image observations. Our
experiments indicate that the proposed framework is able toresolve stereo ambiguities on challenging stereo pairs fromthe KITTI benchmark as illustrated in Fig. 1 (center). At
the same time our method is able to extract 3D object representations which are consistent with the estimated disparity
map and may serve as input to higher-level reasoning, seeFig. 1 (bottom) for an illustration. In combination with recently proposed deep features [68], our model ranks first in
all KITTI stereo evaluation tables. We make our code andobject annotations available on our project website1 .

2. Related Work
As one of the oldest and most fundamental problems incomputer vision [22], computational stereo has witnessed
great progress making it nowadays an attractive alternative
to costly laser scanners for outdoor environment perception,e.g., in autonomous driving [11, 12]. The recent successof stereo methods can be attributed to the development ofbenchmarks such as Middlebury [50]. More recently, the
KITTI benchmark [13] has pushed limits even further by
providing a larger and more realistic stereo dataset withmeaningful object classes and ground truth annotations.
Local stereo methods [14, 20, 23, 27, 37, 46, 50, 67] often fail in challenging scenarios as they suffer from matching ambiguities in weakly textured, saturated or reflective regions. Thus, recent efforts mainly focus on global
methods [2, 16, 41, 42, 54, 60] which are able to overcome some of these problems by imposing smoothness
constraints between adjacent pixels or superpixels. On
the pixel-level, approaches based on semi-global matching(SGM) [17, 18, 52, 53] enjoy great popularity due to their
computational efficiency, accuracy and simplicity. As firstorder approaches such as SGM are not able to express planarity priors, second-order models have recently been investigated either by introducing triple cliques into the formulation [63], by increasing the parameter space [34,43] orby following a total generalized variational (TGV) approach[30, 45]. In contrast, superpixel-based methods [51, 64–66]
model each entity as a slanted plane, thus enforcing planarity implicitely and allowing for larger ranges of interaction, depending on the size of the superpixels. In this paper,
1 http://www.cvlibs.net/projects/displets/

we follow this second line of work, but go beyond pairwiseinteractions by modeling constraints connecting up to several hundred superpixels.
Planes, B-splines and quadratic surfaces have been proposed in [3–5, 24, 69] to better constrain the underlying
problems and simplify inference. Given a set of geometric proposals, the stereo matching problem can be cast as adiscrete labeling problem where each pixel is assigned to a
proposal. This allows the application of standard tools fordiscrete optimization such as belief propagation or graphcuts. While promising, such regularizes ignore the semantic
context which heavily constrains the shape of the geometricprimitives. In contrast, the method proposed in this paper
explicitely conditions on the semantic class, thus allowing
for richer geometries and interactions spanning a larger region in the image.
While the mutual benefits of recognition and reconstruction have been shown using simple priors and multiple
views [15,29], little work has addressed the binocular stereo
problem in this context with notable exceptions [33, 48, 61].
Saxena et al. [48] proposed to directly integrate depthfrom-appearance constraints into the data term. In contrast,
Ladicky et al. [33] model stereo estimation and semantic
segmentation jointly by learning the dependency between
height over ground and the semantic class. Wei et al. [61]follow a data-driven approach which directly transfers disparity information from regions with similar appearance inthe training data using SIFT flow [36]. Unfortunately, thenature of interaction in these models is very local and thus
cannot constrain large ambiguous regions well enough. We
thus propose to leverage object knowledge, akin to [1, 7]
where geometric priors are used to improve multi-view reconstruction for single objects. In contrast to [1,7], the number of objects is unknown in our case. We jointly infer the
disparity map, the number of objects and their geometry.
The proposed method also borrows ideas from binary
segmentation approaches leveraging pattern-based potentials [26,39,47] to encourage plausible label configurations.
While our displet masks can be interpreted as pattern potentials, we differ in that we optimize a continuous label spaceand model interactions far beyond the typical 10 × 10 pixel
patches used in segmentation approaches.

3. Stereo Matching using Displets
In this paper, we tackle the classical task of binocularstereo matching. That is, given the left and right imagesof a synchronized, calibrated and rectified stereo camera,
we are interested in estimating the disparity at each pixelof the reference image (e.g., left image). We assume thatthe image can be decomposed into a set of planar superpixels which we obtain using the StereoSLIC algorithm [65].
In addition to unary and pairwise constraints, we also introduce long-range interactions into our model using dis-

in terms of the following energy function
X
X
S
E(n, d) =ϕSi (ni ) +ψij(ni , nj ) +
i∼j

i∈S

X

ϕD
k (dk ) +

X X

D
ψki
(dk , ni )(1)k∈D i∈Skk∈D

where n = {ni |i ∈ S} and d = {dk |k ∈ D} and i ∼ jdenotes the set of adjacent superpixels in S.

3.1. Data Term
Figure 2: Illustration of Displets: We sample 3D CAD
model configurations ξk (top+center) and extract the planeparameters N̂k = (n̂k,1 , . . . , n̂k,|Sk | )T of the corresponding displet k ∈ D by fitting planes to the rendered disparity
map for all involved superpixels Sk (bottom).
plets, a set of physically plausible disparity maps of a certain semantic class, associated with an image mask and ascore (see Section 4 for further details). Intuitively, displets
can be thought of as a representative finite subset of the infinitely large set of disparity maps for that class conditionedon the image. For example, car displets should cover themost likely 3D car shapes given the two input images. In
this section, we show how displets can be incorporated assoft constraint into a CRF model. This allows us to jointly
optimize for the displets and the disparity map in a principled manner.
More formally, let S and D denote the set of superpixels and displets in the reference image. Each superpixel i ∈ S is associated with a region Ri in the image
and a random variable ni ∈ R3 describing a plane in 3D(nTi x = 1 for x ∈ R3 on the plane). Each displet k ∈ D
is associated with its class label ck ∈ L\{background},a fitness value κk ∈ R, a set of superpixels Sk ⊆ S on
which it is defined and the corresponding plane parametersN̂k = (n̂k,1 , . . . , n̂k,|Sk | )T . The plane parameters are obtained by local plane fitting to the rendered disparity mapof the corresponding CAD model (Fig. 2). An additionalrandom variable dk ∈ {0, 1}, which can be interpreted as
auxiliary variable in a high-order CRF, denotes the presence (dk = 1) or absence (dk = 0) of the displet in thescene. Furthermore, we assume that we have access to arough semantic segmentation of the image S ∈ LW ×H with
|L| the number of semantic labels2 and W × H the image
dimensions. We obtain this segmentation using ALE [31]and refer the reader to Section 5 for further details.
Given the left and right image, our goal is to infer all
superpixel plane parameters ni as well as the presence orabsence of all displets dk in the scene. We specify our CRF
2 While keeping our exposition general, we only consider “car” vs.

“background” in our experiments as cars are the most challenging object
category in KITTI while still sufficiently restricted in terms of geometry.

The data term models the fact that corresponding points
in the left and right image should be similar in appearance.
While many options are possible, we simply penalize deviations from an initial sparse disparity map Ω̂, calculated witha semi-dense feature matching algorithm:X
ϕSi (ni ) =ρτ1 (ω(ni , p) − ω̂(p))(2)
p∈Ri ∩ Ω̂+Here, Ω̂+ denotes the set of valid pixels in Ω̂, ω(ni , p)is the disparity of plane ni at pixel p, and ω̂(p) represents the value of the reference disparity map Ω̂ at pixel
p. Note that given the calibration parameters, the function
ω(ni , p) is straightforward to derive and we specify all neccessary details in the supplementary material. To accountfor outliers, we chose ρτ (·) as the robust l1 penalty functionρτ (x) = min(x, τ ). In Section 5 we further evaluate andcompare two state-of-the-art feature matching algorithms
which yield the initial sparse disparity map Ω̂.

3.2. Local Smoothness
We encourage local smoothness in our formulation bypenalizing discontinuities at superpixel boundaries as well
as by encouraging similar orientations of adjacent superpixels. In particular, our smoothness term decomposes as
XSψij(ni , nj ) = θ1ρτ2 (ω(ni , p) − ω(nj , p)) +p∈Bijθ2 ρτ3 1 − |nTi nj |/(kni kknj k)(3)where Bij denotes the set of shared boundary pixels between superpixel i and superpixel j and the other functions
are defined as above. The weights θ1 , θ2 control the importance of each term with respect to the other terms in
Eq. 1. Inspired by contrast-sensitive smoothness priors, we
downweight θ1 and θ2 if neighboring superpixels i and j
are likely to be separated by an occlusion boundary. This
likelihood is computed by simply detecting large changes
in the gradient of the input disparity map Ω̂.

3.3. Displet Potentials
In order to encode long-range interactions, we introduce displet potentials which encourage plausible geometries in regions corresponding to a certain semantic class.

The unary potential for displet dk is defined asϕD
k (dk ) = −θ3 [dk = 1] · (|[S = ck ] ∩ Mk | + κk )(4)

where [·] denotes the (element-wise) Iverson bracket, Mk
represents the pixel mask corresponding to the set of superpixels Sk , and κk is a fitness score assigned to displet k (seeSection 4 for further details). Intuitively, this potential tries
to explain as many regions in the image which have been
assigned the semantic class label ck using displets whose
shape corresponds to typical objects in class ck .
Furthermore, we define a potential between each displet
and all superpixels it comprises as follows
Dψki(dk , ni ) = λki [dk = 1] · (1 − δ(ni , n̂k,zi ))(5)where zi denotes the index of the plane corresponding tosuperpixel i in Nk and δ(·, ·) = 1 if both arguments areequivalent and 0 otherwise. Further, λki is a penalty value
which takes λki = ∞ inside the object (hard constraint) andλki < ∞ at the object boundaries (soft constraint) to better account for inaccuracies in the displet mask Mk . While
many choices are possible, we define λki as a sigmoid function of the distance transform of Mk and estimate its parameters from training data. It is important to note that thehard constraint avoids evidence undercounting, i.e., it ensures that displets don’t overlap and explain the same region
in the image.

(a) 3D Warehouse Model(b) Semi-Convex Hull(c) QSlim(d) MATLAB

Figure 3: Mesh Simplification. For efficient rendering, we
simplify 3D CAD Models with ∼100k faces (a) by a smoothsemi-convex approximation using 1k faces only (b). The
application of generic mesh simplification algorithms using
the same number of faces produces undesirable holes andself-intersections in the mesh as illustrated in (c+d).
likelihood model compares the rendered disparity map with
the input disparity map Ω̂ and returns a score depending on
the level of agreement. This makes our algorithm invariant
to the actual image intensities which are hard to model in a
generative way, in particular in the presence of reflecting ortranslucent surfaces.

3.4. Inference

4.1. Semi-Convex Hull

Minimizing Eq. 1 is a non-convex mixed continuousdiscrete optimization problem which is NP-hard to solve.
We leverage greedy max-product particle belief propagation(MP-PBP) [44,55] with sequential tree-reweighted message
passing (TRW-S) [25] using 30 particles and 50 iterations
to find an approximate solution. At every iteration, planeparticles are sampled from a normal distribution around theprevious MAP solution and using the plane parameters ofspatially neighboring superpixels. Both strategies complement each other and we found their combination importantfor efficiently exploring the search space. To ensure that
displets are selected with non-zero probability, we augment
the proposal set for a superpixel by the plane parameters of
all overlapping displets. We initialize all superpixel planes
using the StereoSLIC algorithm [65].

We start with a set of representative CAD models from
Google 3D Warehouse3 which capture most of the 3D shapevariability of the object category. Unfortunately, CAD models downloaded from Google Warehouse are not directly
applicable as they are often designed with love of detail resulting in hundreds of thousands of vertices and faces, slowing down the rendering process significantly. We found thattools like MATLAB’s reducepatch function4 or QSlim[10] are not able to simplify these models to an affordable
level of detail without introducing holes or artifacts as illustrated in Fig. 3. In this section, we thus propose a simple
method which reduces a CAD model of geometrically simple classes such as cars to around 1000 faces while preserving the hull of the object and removing all interior elements
which are not affecting the rendered depth map.
We initialize a mesh using the convex hull of the object
and gradually relax it to a smooth approximation, subject
to the constraint that the volume of the model comprises
all surface points. We call this representation the “semiconvex hull” of an object. In particular, we minimize thesquared point-to-point distances between all vertices of themesh and densely sampled points on the original 3D model.

4. Rapid Inverse Graphics
This section describes how we subsample the infinitely
large space of disparity maps using inverse graphics, yielding the set of displets D used in the previous section. We
make use of MCMC to draw a set of representative samples
corresponding to a certain object category (e.g., cars). In
contrast to [38], our generative process produces disparity
maps from CAD models using the camera intrinsics. Our

3 https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/
4 http://www.mathworks.de/help/matlab/ref/reducepatch.html

Algorithm 1: Mesh Simplification
Input: 3D CAD model
Output: Semi-convex hull (M, x)
1 P ← draw samples from 3D CAD model
2 (M, x) ← convex hull of 3D CAD model
3 (M, x) ← remeshing of (M, x) using [9]4 while not converged do
5x ← x − γ ∇E(x)6
if P * Vol(M, x) then7
α ← min({α > 0 | P ⊆ Vol(M, α x)})8x ← (α + ) x
9(M, x) ← remeshing of (M, x) using [9]10 (M, x) ← simplification of (M, x) using [10]More formally, let P denote the set of 3D points obtainedby uniformly sampling a large number of 3D points fromthe union of all surfaces of the object (full resolution CAD
model). Let further M = {V, F} denote a mesh with vertices V, faces F and edges E(F). Each vertex i ∈ V is associated with a variable xi ∈ R3 specifying the location of thevertex. We initialize M and x = {xi |i ∈ V} by uniformly
remeshing the object’s convex hull using isotropic surface
remeshing [9] and formulate our objective as minimizing
2
X
X 
2
2
E(x) =
kxi − nn(xi )k +kxi − xj k − ¯l0
i∈V

s.t.

(i,j)∈EP ⊆ Vol(M, x)(6)¯
where nn(xi ) denotes the nearest neighbor of xi in P, l0 is
the average edge length of the initial mesh, and Vol(M, x)
denotes the set of 3D points inside the mesh. We solve Eq. 6
using gradient descent and enforce the closure constraint
P ⊆ Vol(M, x) by mesh rescaling and uniform remeshingon violation. After convergence, we obtain a smooth semiconvex hull of the object which we simplify to 1k faces using QSlim [10]. See Algorithm 1 for further details.

4.2. Sampling the Space of Displets
For a given object category c, we are interested in subsampling the space of plausible displets given a semi-dense
disparity image Ω̂, a semantic segmentation S, and thesemi-convex hull of all CAD models of this object category.
We approach this inverse graphics problem using MCMC,
i.e., we sample pose parameters ξ ∈ SE(3) directly fromthe observation model p(ξ|Ω̂) ∝ exp(−EΩ̂ (ξ)) withX min (|ω̄(p, ξ) − ω̂(p)|, τ1 )EΩ̂ (ξ) =|Ω̂+ ∩ O|p∈Ω̂+ ∩ OX
+β[ω̄(p, ξ) > ω̂(p) + τ2 ]
(7)
p∈Ω̂+

Here, O denotes a 2D object instance in the image, ω̄(p, ξ)is the disparity of the CAD model in pose ξ rendered at

pixel p, and β, τ1 , τ2 > 0 are parameters of the model.
Intuitively, EΩ̂ (ξ) encourages displets to explain all pixels within object region O in terms of disparity (first term)
while avoiding the occlusion of other objects (second term).
In principle, the use of object proposals O could be avoided
by directly sampling according to the semantic labeling S,
but we found instance level information to improve the diversity of the displet set. While a large number of genericobject proposal algorithms [6, 28, 56, 70] can be applied toobtain the set of object proposal regions {O}, we found amuch more simple strategy to be sufficient for our goals:
First, we project all valid pixels of class c (p ∈ Ω̂+ ∩ [S =c]) into 3D. Next, we apply kernel density estimation (KDE)
along the principal coordinate axes x and z of the camera.
As object boundaries frequently coincide with minima of
the KDE, we propose one object region O for each pair ofadjacent minima by projecting all 3D points in this range
back into the image. It is important to note that we do notassume precise object boundaries for the proposals due tothe robust term in Eq. 7.
We run one Markov chain for each combination of
CAD models and object proposals using Metropolis-withinGibbs (MWG) sampling (5.000 iterations) with randomly
chosen blocks. For each combination, we select the 8 mostdominant modes after burn-in and combine all results toyield the final set of displets. An illustration is given in
the supplementary material. As our semi-convex mesh has
a low number of vertices and faces, we are able to draw alarge number of samples on commodity graphics hardware.
In practice, we achieve ∼ 8200 fps on a single NVIDIA
Quadro 4000 GPU using 12 threads.

5. Experimental Results
This section provides a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of the proposed displet model. As the number of images and objects per category in Middlebury [50]is too small to allow for a meaningful evaluation, we chosethe more recent and challenging KITTI stereo dataset [13]as testbed for our experiments. Following the KITTI evaluation protocol, we perform all ablation studies on the training set from which we randomly select 50 images for training the parameters in our model. The remaining images
are used for validation. In addition we submit our best performing configuration to the KITTI server for evaluation on
the test set. We perform block coordinate descent on the 50
training images to obtain the model parameters {θ} and {τ }which we fix throughout all our experiments. For further
details we refer the reader to the supplementary material.
Image Features: We manually annotated the training andtest sets with pixel-wise car versus background labels andtrained the associative hierarchical random fields model[31] for semantic segmentation. In order to obtain sparseCNN−Out−All
CNN−Out−Noc
SGM−Out−All
SGM−Out−Noc

15

10

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Error (%)

20

20

Error (%)

CNN−Out−All
CNN−Out−Noc
SGM−Out−All
SGM−Out−Noc

15

10

1.0

0

1

Acceptance Probability

3

4

5

6

7

8

Figure 4: Number of Proposals and Models. This figure
shows the performance in reflective regions when limiting
the number of object proposals (left) and models (right).
CNN−Out−All
CNN−Out−Noc
SGM−Out−All
SGM−Out−Noc

Error (%)

6
5
4

16

CNN−Out−All
CNN−Out−Noc
SGM−Out−All
SGM−Out−Noc

14

Error (%)

7

12
10
8

3
6
200

400

600

800

200

1000

400

600

800

1000

Number of Superpixels

Number of Superpixels

Figure 5: Number of Superpixels. These figures show the
impact when varying the number of superpixels for all regions (left) and for reflective regions (right).
2.84

Error
Energy 260

2.82

250

2.81

240

2.8

230

2.79

220

2.78

210

2.77
0

20

40

60

Iterations

80

200
100

4

Energy270

2.83

Error (%)

Error (%)

Ablation Study: Our first set of experiments conductedon the KITTI training set aims at assessing the contributionof each individual term in our energy. As we expect mostnotable improvements at reflective surfaces, we evaluate theerror in all image regions (Table 1b) as well as the error
only in reflective regions (Table 1a) using the KITTI groundtruth. Unless otherwise stated, we report the percentage ofoutliers using the default outlier threshold of 3 pixels.
The first row in 1 shows the results of the input disparity
maps, interpolated using the KITTI development kit. The
following rows show our results when using only the unaryterm or combining it with one of the pairwise smoothness
terms for superpixel boundaries (“Pair (Boundary)”), orientations (“Pair (Orientation)”) and both (“Pair”), respectively. In combination, both smoothness terms are able toreduce the error by 16.6% for reflective and by 5.7% for all
image regions considering the better performing CNN features. Adding the occlusion sensitive weight further reduces
the error in all image regions but makes results slightly
worse at reflective surfaces. This can be attributed to thefact that the input disparity maps contain holes and errors at
reflective regions which are sometimes erroneously identified as occlusion boundaries hence lowering the smoothing
effect for these regions. Finally, adding the proposed displets to the model dramatically improves the results, reducing the number of outliers by additional 53.3% in reflective
regions and by 8.6% in all regions.
Next, we evaluate the influence of the number of object
proposals as well as the variety of CAD models used forgenerating the displets. For these experiments, we focus
our attention on the reflective regions as those are most affected by limiting the number of displets. As we obtaina different number of displet proposals in each image, we
randomly draw subsets and plot the error with respect to theacceptance probability of a displet in Fig. 4 (left). Here,P = 0 corresponds to the case without displets and P = 1
corresponds to the case when making use of all available
proposals for inference. The performance with respect tothe number of CAD models used is shown in Fig. 4 (right).
For this experiment, we randomly select a subset of models
for each image (ranging from 0 to all 8 models) and discard
all the proposals from all other models. Both plots illustratethat reasonable results can be obtained with a small numberof displet proposals and 3 models only. However, in bothcases performance keeps increasing when adding more displets.

2

Number of Models

340

3.95

Error
Energy 320

3.9

300

3.85

280

3.8

260

3.75
0

20

40

60

Iterations

80

Energybut high-quality input disparity maps we process all stereo
pairs using the semi-global matching framework [18] followed by a simple left-right consistency check to remove
outliers. For calculating the matching costs, we use a combination of Census and Sobel features (“SGM”, [64]), as
well as more recently proposed features based on convolutional neural networks (“CNN”, [68]).

240
100

Figure 6: Convergence of Error and Energy. This figure
shows the decrease in error and energy on all image regions
vs. MP-PBP iterations using CNN (left) and SGM (right).
In Fig. 5, we investigate the impact of the number ofsuperpixels on the performance of our model. Similarly
to [64], we observe diminishing returns beyond 500 superpixels and chose 1000 superpixels as a reasonable tradeoff between accuracy and performance for all other experiments.
As our inference procedure is an iterative process withruntime linear in the number of iterations we plot the energy and errors through the iterations to determine the pointof convergence. Fig. 6 shows the average energy and error
over the images in validation set using CNN (left) and SGM(right) as input disparity maps. As both the error and the energy stabilize after about 40 iterations, we set the maximum
number of iterations to this value throughout all our experiments.
Results on the KITTI Stereo Benchmark: This section
compares our performance with respect to the current state-

CNN
SGM
Out-Noc Out-All Out-Noc Out-All
Input Ω̂ (Interpolated)
19.84 % 22.98 % 22.60 % 25.52 %Unary Only
17.72 % 21.72 % 19.38 % 23.36 %Unary + Pair (Boundary) 15.96 % 19.67 % 16.18 % 19.94 %Unary + Pair (Normal)
17.06 % 20.80 % 18.24 % 21.86 %Unary + Pair
14.78 % 18.77 % 14.91 % 18.85 %Unary + Pair + Occ
15.32 % 19.32 % 15.79 % 19.60 %Unary + Pair + Disp
7.08 % 9.30 % 7.45 % 9.98 %Unary + Pair + Occ + Disp 7.16 % 9.41 % 7.59 % 10.02 %CNN
SGM
Out-Noc Out-All Out-Noc Out-All
Input Ω̂ (Interpolated)
3.35 % 4.28 % 5.13 % 6.08 %Unary Only
3.31 % 4.60 % 4.71 % 5.96 %3.21 % 4.15 % 4.28 % 5.23 %Unary + Pair (Boundary)
Unary + Pair (Normal)
3.28 % 4.31 % 4.52 % 5.60 %Unary + Pair
3.12 % 3.95 % 4.13 % 4.93 %Unary + Pair + Occ
3.04 % 3.88 % 4.07 % 4.80 %Unary + Pair + Disp
2.87 % 3.64 % 3.87 % 4.57 %Unary + Pair + Occ + Disp 2.78 % 3.55 % 3.76 % 4.50 %(a) Reflective Regions(b) All Regions

Table 1: Importance of Different Terms in the Model. This table shows the performance of various model configurations
on the validation set of KITTI for reflective regions (a) and for all regions (b) using the default error threshold of 3 pixels.
Rank
MethodOut-Noc Out-All Avg-Noc Avg-All
1
Our Method8.40 % 9.89 % 1.9 px 2.3 px
2
VC-SF * [57]
11.58 % 12.29 % 2.7 px 2.8 px
3
PCBP-SS [65]14.26 % 18.33 % 2.4 px 3.9 px
4
SPS-StFl * [66] 14.74 % 18.00 % 2.9 px 3.6 px
CoP
15.30 % 19.15 % 2.7 px 4.1 px
5
6
SPS-St [66]16.05 % 19.34 % 3.1 px 3.6 px
DDS-SS [61]16.23 % 19.39 % 2.5 px 3.0 px
78PCBP [64]16.28 % 20.22 % 2.8 px 4.4 px
9PR-Sf+E * [58] 17.85 % 20.82 % 3.3 px 4.0 px
StereoSLIC [65] 18.22 % 21.60 % 2.8 px 3.6 px
1011MC-CNN [68]18.45 % 21.96 % 3.5 px 4.3 px
12 PR-Sceneflow * [58] 19.22 % 22.07 % 3.3 px 4.0 px
..
..
..
..
..
.
.
.
.
.
ALE-Stereo [33] 83.80 % 84.37 % 24.6 px 25.4 px
62

Rank
MethodOut-Noc Out-All Avg-Noc Avg-All
1
Our Method
2.47 % 3.27 % 0.7 px 0.9 px
2MC-CNN [68]2.61 % 3.84 % 0.8 px 1.0 px
3
SPS-StFl * [66]2.83 % 3.64 % 0.8 px 0.9 px
4
VC-SF * [57]3.05 % 3.31 % 0.8 px 0.8 px
SPS-St [66]3.39 % 4.41 % 0.9 px 1.0 px
56
PCBP-SS [65]3.40 % 4.72 % 0.8 px 1.0 px
CoP
3.78 % 4.63 % 0.9 px 1.1 px
7
8
DDS-SS [61]3.83 % 4.59 % 0.9 px 1.0 px
9StereoSLIC [65]3.92 % 5.11 % 0.9 px 1.0 px
PR-Sf+E * [58]4.02 % 4.87 % 0.9 px 1.0 px
1011
PCBP [64]4.04 % 5.37 % 0.9 px 1.1 px
12 PR-Sceneflow * [58] 4.36 % 5.22 % 0.9 px 1.1 px
..
..
..
..
..
..
.
.
.
.
.
.
ALE-Stereo [33] 50.48 % 51.19 % 13.0 px 13.5 px
62(a) Reflective Regions(b) All Regions

Table 2: Quantitative Evaluation on the KITTI Stereo Benchmark. This table shows the KITTI stereo leaderboards attime of submission using the default error threshold of 3 pixels. Evaluation is performed separately for reflective regions (a)and for all regions (b) of the KITTI test set. The numbers represent outliers (in %) and average disparity error (in pixels).
Methods marked with an asterisk are scene flow methods which use two or more stereo image pairs as input.

of-the-art. We submitted our results for the KITTI test set
using the best performing configuration according to Table 1b (CNN+Full model) to the KITTI evaluation server.
As shown in Table 2, our method ranks first amongst morethan 60 competitors in all evaluation categories. As expected, our improvements are particularly pronounced in reflective regions, but also improve overall performance evenwith respect to scene flow methods which take two or more
stereo pairs of the sequence as input. The relatively weak
performance of ALE-Stereo [33] can be attributed to thesimple semantic interaction model as well as the suboptimal graph-cuts based inference procedure.
Qualitative Results: Fig. 7 shows some qualitative results of our method without displets (left column in eachsubfigure) as well as our full model including displets (rightcolumn in each subfigure). As evidenced by the error im-ages in the last row of each subfigure, the proposed displet
significantly reduces errors for the category car in a large
number of images and even in extremely challenging scenarios such as the subfigure in row 2, column 2. Two failurecases are highlighted at the bottom: In the left scene, errors on the caravan increase slightly as our collection of 3D
CAD models doesn’t contain an instance of this rather rarevehicle type. In the right scene the trunc of the car is extrapolated towards the building due to failures in the semantic
segmentation (indicated in green) while the overall reconstruction of the trunk has improved.
Runtime: Our non-optimized MATLAB implementation
with C++ wrappers requires on average 60 seconds for sampling the displets (parallelized using 12 cores), 5 seconds
for initialization and 2.5 seconds for each of the 40 MPPBP iterations, including graph construction (2.2 seconds)

Figure 7: Qualitiative Results. Each subfigure shows from top-to-bottom: The input image, the superpixels and the semantic
segments which our method takes as input (first row), our inference results without and with displets (second row), and thecorresponding error maps from ≤ 1 pixel error in black to ≥ 5 pixels error in white (third row). We mark regions with
big improvements using red and blue rectangles. Two failure cases where the displets do not fit the data in terms of depth(bottom-left) and shape (bottom-right) are illustrated below the horizontal line.
and TRW-S inference (0.3 seconds). In addition, ALE [31]requires 3.5 second per binary image segmentation and we
obtain our initial disparity maps in 5 seconds for SGM or
100 seconds for CNN. We thus require 265 seconds in total
for processing a single image using the full model in combination with CNN based matching costs.
Supplementary Material: We encourage the reader tolook at our project website as well as the supplementary material5 where we provide an analysis of performance withrespect to variation of parameters, number of particles aswell as additional qualitative results on the KITTI stereo
validation set. The project page also provides two videos
comparing our 3D reconstruction performance to that ofZbontar et al. [68] and demonstrating the optimization of
the semi-convex hull.
5 http://www.cvlibs.net/projects/displets/

6. Conclusion and Future Work
We propose displets as expressive non-local prior for resolving ambiguities in stereo matching. By conditioning
on the semantic class of an object, displets provide valuable category specific shape information which allows forregularizing the solution over very large distances in theimage. Our displet model for cars attains state-of-the-art
performance on the challenging KITTI stereo benchmark,lowering errors in reflective and textureless regions by 50%.
While in this paper we deliberately focused on this particular object category, we plan to investigate the applicabilityof displets to other geometrically well constrained object
classes in the future. Buildings, for instance, often lack texture but their shape can be well described by a set of planes
or 3D box primitives. Another interesting future direction isthe extension of displets to flowlets for serving as non-local
category specific prior in optical flow and scene flow.

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