Reusable Architecture Growth for Continual Stereo Matching
Chenghao Zhang Gaofeng Meng Bin Fan Kun Tian Zhaoxiang Zhang Shiming Xiang Chunhong Pan
The remarkable performance of recent stereo depth estimation models benefits
from the successful use of convolutional neural networks to regress dense
disparity. Akin to most tasks, this needs gathering training data that covers a
number of heterogeneous scenes at deployment time. However, training samples
are typically acquired continuously in practical applications, making the
capability to learn new scenes continually even more crucial. For this purpose,
we propose to perform continual stereo matching where a model is tasked to 1)
continually learn new scenes, 2) overcome forgetting previously learned scenes,
and 3) continuously predict disparities at inference. We achieve this goal by
introducing a Reusable Architecture Growth (RAG) framework. RAG leverages
task-specific neural unit search and architecture growth to learn new scenes
continually in both supervised and self-supervised manners. It can maintain
high reusability during growth by reusing previous units while obtaining good
performance. Additionally, we present a Scene Router module to adaptively
select the scene-specific architecture path at inference. Comprehensive
experiments on numerous datasets show that our framework performs impressively
in various weather, road, and city circumstances and surpasses the
state-of-the-art methods in more challenging cross-dataset settings. Further
experiments also demonstrate the adaptability of our method to unseen scenes,
which can facilitate end-to-end stereo architecture learning and practical
deployment.