[Submitted on 2 Sep 2026]
Title:EMCStereo: Attention-Enhanced Stereo Matching for Thin-Structure Depth Estimation with a Synthetic Tree-Branch Benchmark
View a PDF of the paper titled EMCStereo: Attention-Enhanced Stereo Matching for Thin-Structure Depth Estimation with a Synthetic Tree-Branch Benchmark, by Yida Lin and 4 other authors
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Abstract:Thin structures such as tree branches are among the hardest cases for stereo matching: a branch is only a few pixels wide, the background is cluttered, and dense ground truth for real branches is nearly impossible to label by hand. We make three contributions. First, EMCStereo integrates three lightweight attention modules into a PSMNet-style cost-volume backbone: Efficient Multi-scale Attention (EMA) on deep semantic features, a Multi-Scale Fusion block (MSFblock) learning spatial pyramid weights instead of concatenating them, and Coordinate Attention (CoordAtt) on final matching features. Because MSFblock collapses four pyramid branches into one, the modules leave the network 2.0% smaller and add only 1.7% inference time overhead. Second, VirtualTree is a synthetic stereo dataset rendered in Unreal Engine 5 with a simulated ZED Mini rig, providing 5,520 pairs with exact disparity for thin branches. Third, an eight-way ablation establishes a run-to-run noise floor of 0.009 px end-point error (EPE). EMCStereo achieves 1.31 px EPE (5.96% D1-all) on the VirtualTree test split, 1.00 px on SceneFlow, and 0.80, 0.73, 0.62, and 3.19 px on KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, ETH3D, and Middlebury, with depth accuracy delta_1 from 92.6% to 98.7%. Evaluated against the noise floor, the attention stack is accuracy-neutral at a 100-epoch budget, while MSFblock and CoordAtt cost 0.03-0.05 px unless EMA is present.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2609.13233 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2609.13233v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.13233
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history
From: Yida Lin [view email] [v1] Wed, 2 Sep 2026 11:32:23 UTC (7,820 KB)
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