  Human beings process stereoscopic correspondence across multiple scales.
However, this bio-inspiration is ignored by state-of-the-art cost aggregation
methods for dense stereo correspondence. In this paper, a generic cross-scale
cost aggregation framework is proposed to allow multi-scale interaction in cost
aggregation. We firstly reformulate cost aggregation from a unified
optimization perspective and show that different cost aggregation methods
essentially differ in the choices of similarity kernels. Then, an inter-scale
regularizer is introduced into optimization and solving this new optimization
problem leads to the proposed framework. Since the regularization term is
independent of the similarity kernel, various cost aggregation methods can be
integrated into the proposed general framework. We show that the cross-scale
framework is important as it effectively and efficiently expands
state-of-the-art cost aggregation methods and leads to significant
improvements, when evaluated on Middlebury, KITTI and New Tsukuba datasets.
