Stereo Image Restoration via Attention-Guided Correspondence Learning

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2024 Jul;46(7):4850-4865. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2024.3357709. Epub 2024 Jun 5.

Abstract

Although stereo image restoration has been extensively studied, most existing work focuses on restoring stereo images with limited horizontal parallax due to the binocular symmetry constraint. Stereo images with unlimited parallax (e.g., large ranges and asymmetrical types) are more challenging in real-world applications and have rarely been explored so far. To restore high-quality stereo images with unlimited parallax, this paper proposes an attention-guided correspondence learning method, which learns both self- and cross-views feature correspondence guided by parallax and omnidirectional attention. To learn cross-view feature correspondence, a Selective Parallax Attention Module (SPAM) is proposed to interact with cross-view features under the guidance of parallax attention that adaptively selects receptive fields for different parallax ranges. Furthermore, to handle asymmetrical parallax, we propose a Non-local Omnidirectional Attention Module (NOAM) to learn the non-local correlation of both self- and cross-view contexts, which guides the aggregation of global contextual features. Finally, we propose an Attention-guided Correspondence Learning Restoration Network (ACLRNet) upon SPAMs and NOAMs to restore stereo images by associating the features of two views based on the learned correspondence. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method on three stereo image restoration tasks including super-resolution, denoising, and compression artifact reduction.