This paper addresses the problem of Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE). Existing approaches on MDE usually model it as a pixel-level regression problem, ignoring the underlying geometry property. We empirically find this may result in sub-optimal solution: while the predicted depth map presents small loss value in one specific view, it may exhibit large loss if viewed in different directions. In this paper, inspired by multi-view stereo (MVS), we propose an Adversarial View-Consistent Learning (AVCL) framework to force the estimated depth map to be all reasonable viewed from multiple views. To this end, we first design a differentiable depth map warping operation, which is end-to-end trainable, and then propose a pose generator to generate novel views for a given image in an adversarial manner. Collaborating with the differentiable depth map warping operation, the pose generator encourages the depth estimation network to learn from hard views, hence produce view-consistent depth maps . We evaluate our method on NYU Depth V2 dataset and the experimental results show promising performance gain upon state-of-the-art MDE approaches.
Accurate depth estimation with lowest compute and energy cost is a crucial requirement for unmanned and battery operated autonomous systems. Robotic applications require real time depth estimation for navigation and decision making under rapidly changing 3D surroundings. A high accuracy algorithm may provide the best depth estimation but may consume tremendous compute and energy resources. A general trade-off is to choose less accurate methods for initial depth estimate and a more accurate yet compute intensive method when needed. Previous work has shown this trade-off can be improved by devel…
One of the important parameters for the assessment of glaucoma is optic nerve head (ONH) evaluation, which usually involves depth estimation and subsequent optic disc and cup boundary extraction. Depth is usually obtained explicitly from imaging modalities like optical coherence tomography (OCT) and is very challenging to estimate depth from a single RGB image. To this end, we propose a novel method using adversarial network to predict depth map from a single image. The proposed depth estimation technique is trained and evaluated using individual retinal images from INSPIRE-stereo dataset. We …
Carnegie Mellon University Africa（卡内基梅隆大学非洲分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Monocular Depth Estimation is usually treated as a supervised and regression problem when it actually is very similar to semantic segmentation task since they both are fundamentally pixel-level classification tasks. We applied depth increments that increases with depth in discretizing depth values and then applied Deeplab v2 and the result was higher accuracy. We were able to achieve a state-of-the-art result on the KITTI dataset and outperformed existing architecture by an 8% margin.
Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University（名古屋大学大学院工学研究科）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）
Thanks to the excellent learning capability of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), monocular depth estimation using CNNs has achieved great success in recent years. However, depth estimation from a monocular image alone is essentially an ill-posed problem, and thus, it seems that this approach would have inherent vulnerabilities. To reveal this limitation, we propose a method of adversarial patch attack on monocular depth estimation. More specifically, we generate artificial patterns (adversarial patches) that can fool the target methods into estimating an incorrect depth for the regions…
Clemson University（克莱姆森大学）；The City University of New York（纽约市立大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Self-supervised monocular depth prediction provides a cost-effective solution to obtain the 3D location of each pixel. However, the existing approaches usually lead to unsatisfactory accuracy, which is critical for autonomous robots. In this paper, we propose FusionDepth, a novel two-stage network to advance the self-supervised monocular dense depth learning by leveraging low-cost sparse (e.g. 4-beam) LiDAR. Unlike the existing methods that use sparse LiDAR mainly in a manner of time-consuming iterative post-processing, our model fuses monocular image features and sparse LiDAR features to pred…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；DUniversum（3DUniversum）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
In this paper we address the benefit of adding adversarial training to the task of monocular depth estimation. A model can be trained in a self-supervised setting on stereo pairs of images, where depth (disparities) are an intermediate result in a right-to-left image reconstruction pipeline. For the quality of the image reconstruction and disparity prediction, a combination of different losses is used, including L1 image reconstruction losses and left-right disparity smoothness. These are local pixel-wise losses, while depth prediction requires global consistency. Therefore, we extend the self…
Autonomous cars need continuously updated depth information. Thus far, depth is mostly estimated independently for a single frame at a time, even if the method starts from video input. Our method produces a time series of depth maps, which makes it an ideal candidate for online learning approaches. In particular, we put three different types of depth estimation (supervised depth prediction, self-supervised depth prediction, and self-supervised depth completion) into a common framework. We integrate the corresponding networks with a ConvLSTM such that the spatiotemporal structures of depth acro…
Recent advances in self-supervised learning havedemonstrated that it is possible to learn accurate monoculardepth reconstruction from raw video data, without using any 3Dground truth for supervision. However, in robotics applications,multiple views of a scene may or may not be available, depend-ing on the actions of the robot, switching between monocularand multi-view reconstruction. To address this mixed setting,we proposed a new approach that extends any off-the-shelfself-supervised monocular depth reconstruction system to usemore than one image at test time. Our method builds on astandard p…
Centre for Research and Technology Hellas（希腊研究与科技中心）；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid（马德里理工大学）
In this work we contribute a distribution shift benchmark for a computer vision task; monocular depth estimation. Our differentiation is the decomposition of the wider distribution shift of uncontrolled testing on in-the-wild data, to three distinct distribution shifts. Specifically, we generate data via synthesis and analyze them to produce covariate (color input), prior (depth output) and concept (their relationship) distribution shifts. We also synthesize combinations and show how each one is indeed a different challenge to address, as stacking them produces increased performance drops and …
The Computer Vision Center (CVC)（计算机视觉中心）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Huawei European Research Center（华为欧洲研究中心）
Depth estimation provides essential information to perform autonomous driving and driver assistance. Especially, Monocular Depth Estimation is interesting from a practical point of view, since using a single camera is cheaper than many other options and avoids the need for continuous calibration strategies as required by stereo-vision approaches. State-of-the-art methods for Monocular Depth Estimation are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). A promising line of work consists of introducing additional semantic information about the traffic scene when training CNNs for depth estimation…
NAVER LABS（NAVER实验室）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
Monocular depth estimation in the wild inherently predicts depth up to an unknown scale. To resolve scale ambiguity issue, we present a learning algorithm that leverages monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with proprioceptive sensors. Such monocular SLAM systems can provide metrically scaled camera poses. Given these metric poses and monocular sequences, we propose a self-supervised learning method for the pre-trained supervised monocular depth networks to enable metrically scaled depth estimation. Our approach is based on a teacher-student formulation which guides our netwo…
We study the effect of adversarial perturbations on the task of monocular depth prediction. Specifically, we explore the ability of small, imperceptible additive perturbations to selectively alter the perceived geometry of the scene. We show that such perturbations can not only globally re-scale the predicted distances from the camera, but also alter the prediction to match a different target scene. We also show that, when given semantic or instance information, perturbations can fool the network to alter the depth of specific categories or instances in the scene, and even remove them while pr…
Paris-Saclay University（巴黎萨克雷大学）；ENSTA Paris（巴黎高等先进技术学院）；Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院）
Monocular depth is important in many tasks, such as 3D reconstruction and autonomous driving. Deep learning based models achieve state-of-the-art performance in this field. A set of novel approaches for estimating monocular depth consists of transforming the regression task into a classification one. However, there is a lack of detailed descriptions and comparisons for Classification Approaches for Regression (CAR) in the community and no in-depth exploration of their potential for uncertainty estimation. To this end, this paper will introduce a taxonomy and summary of CAR approaches, a new un…
Hikvision Research Institute (HRI), Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. Ltd（海康威视研究院（HRI），杭州海康威视数字技术有限公司）
This paper addresses the importance of full-image supervision for monocular depth estimation. We propose a semi-supervised architecture, which combines both unsupervised framework of using image consistency and supervised framework of dense depth completion. The latter provides full-image depth as supervision for the former. Ego-motion from navigation system is also embedded into the unsupervised framework as output supervision of an inner temporal transform network, making monocular depth estimation better. In the evaluation, we show that our proposed model outperforms other approaches on dep…
Toyota Research Institute (TRI)（丰田研究院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Self-supervised learning is showing great promise for monocular depth estimation, using geometry as the only source of supervision. Depth networks are indeed capable of learning representations that relate visual appearance to 3D properties by implicitly leveraging category-level patterns. In this work we investigate how to leverage more directly this semantic structure to guide geometric representation learning, while remaining in the self-supervised regime. Instead of using semantic labels and proxy losses in a multi-task approach, we propose a new architecture leveraging fixed pretrained se…
Depth estimation from monocular images is a challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we tackle this problem using a novel network architecture using multi scale feature fusion. Our network uses two different blocks, first which uses different filter sizes for convolution and merges all the individual feature maps. The second block uses dilated convolutions in place of fully connected layers thus reducing computations and increasing the receptive field. We present a new loss function for training the network which uses a depth regression term, SSIM loss term and a multinomial logi…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Northwest A&F University（西北农林科技大学）；CSIRO Data61（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Monocular visual odometry (VO) is an important task in robotics and computer vision. Thus far, how to build accurate and robust monocular VO systems that can work well in diverse scenarios remains largely unsolved. In this paper, we propose a framework to exploit monocular depth estimation for improving VO. The core of our framework is a monocular depth estimation module with a strong generalization capability for diverse scenes. It consists of two separate working modes to assist the localization and mapping. With a single monocular image input, the depth estimation module predicts a relative…
Indiana University（印第安纳大学）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute（电子通信研究院）
Estimating depth from a monocular image is an ill-posed problem: when the camera projects a 3D scene onto a 2D plane, depth information is inherently and permanently lost. Nevertheless, recent work has shown impressive results in estimating 3D structure from 2D images using deep learning. In this paper, we put on an introspective hat and analyze state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models in indoor scenes to understand these models' limitations and error patterns. To address errors in depth estimation, we introduce a novel Depth Error Detection Network (DEDN) that spatially identifies e…
McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）；University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Despite recent improvement of supervised monocular depth estimation, the lack of high quality pixel-wise ground truth annotations has become a major hurdle for further progress. In this work, we propose a new unsupervised depth estimation method based on pseudo supervision mechanism by training a teacher-student network with knowledge distillation. It strategically integrates the advantages of supervised and unsupervised monocular depth estimation, as well as unsupervised binocular depth estimation. Specifically, the teacher network takes advantage of the effectiveness of binocular depth estim…
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）
Depth information is important for autonomous systems to perceive environments and estimate their own state. Traditional depth estimation methods, like structure from motion and stereo vision matching, are built on feature correspondences of multiple viewpoints. Meanwhile, the predicted depth maps are sparse. Inferring depth information from a single image (monocular depth estimation) is an ill-posed problem. With the rapid development of deep neural networks, monocular depth estimation based on deep learning has been widely studied recently and achieved promising performance in accuracy. Mean…
University of Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕大学）；DFKI（德国人工智能研究中心）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
The majority of the existing methods for non-rigid 3D surface regression from monocular 2D images require an object template or point tracks over multiple frames as an input, and are still far from real-time processing rates. In this work, we present the Isometry-Aware Monocular Generative Adversarial Network (IsMo-GAN) - an approach for direct 3D reconstruction from a single image, trained for the deformation model in an adversarial manner on a light-weight synthetic dataset. IsMo-GAN reconstructs surfaces from real images under varying illumination, camera poses, textures and shading at over…
At present, deep learning has been applied more and more in monocular image depth estimation and has shown promising results. The current more ideal method for monocular depth estimation is the supervised learning based on ground truth depth, but this method requires an abundance of expensive ground truth depth as the supervised labels. Therefore, researchers began to work on unsupervised depth estimation methods. Although the accuracy of unsupervised depth estimation method is still lower than that of supervised method, it is a promising research direction. In this paper, Based on the experim…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；PhiGent Robotics（鉴智机器人）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Self-supervised monocular methods can efficiently learn depth information of weakly textured surfaces or reflective objects. However, the depth accuracy is limited due to the inherent ambiguity in monocular geometric modeling. In contrast, multi-frame depth estimation methods improve the depth accuracy thanks to the success of Multi-View Stereo (MVS), which directly makes use of geometric constraints. Unfortunately, MVS often suffers from texture-less regions, non-Lambertian surfaces, and moving objects, especially in real-world video sequences without known camera motion and depth supervision…
Two-in-One Depth: Bridging the Gap Between Monocular and Binocular Self-supervised Depth Estimation
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统全国重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, UCAS（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Monocular visual odometry approaches that purely rely on geometric cues are prone to scale drift and require sufficient motion parallax in successive frames for motion estimation and 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we propose to leverage deep monocular depth prediction to overcome limitations of geometry-based monocular visual odometry. To this end, we incorporate deep depth predictions into Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) as direct virtual stereo measurements. For depth prediction, we design a novel deep network that refines predicted depth from a single image in a two-stage process. We train …
Rethinking Monocular Depth Embedding for Generalized Stereo Matching
Shaanxi Key Laboratory for Network Computing and Security Technology, Xi’an University of Technology（陕西理工大学网络计算与安全技术重点实验室）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）
NavInfo Europe（四维图新欧洲公司）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation is a salient task for 3D scene understanding. Learned jointly with monocular ego-motion estimation, several methods have been proposed to predict accurate pixel-wise depth without using labeled data. Nevertheless, these methods focus on improving performance under ideal conditions without natural or digital corruptions. The general absence of occlusions is assumed even for object-specific depth estimation. These methods are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which is a pertinent concern for their reliable deployment in robots and autonomous drivi…
Ewha W. University（梨花女子大学）；Yonsei University（延世大学）；Korea Aerospace University（韩国航空大学）；Korea University（高丽大学）
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has become an appealing solution to the lack of ground truth labels, but its reconstruction loss often produces over-smoothed results across object boundaries and is incapable of handling occlusion explicitly. In this paper, we propose a new approach to leverage pseudo ground truth depth maps of stereo images generated from self-supervised stereo matching methods. The confidence map of the pseudo ground truth depth map is estimated to mitigate performance degeneration by inaccurate pseudo depth maps. To cope with the prediction error of the confidence…
Most monocular depth sensing methods use conventionally captured images that are created without considering scene content. In contrast, animal eyes have fast mechanical motions, called saccades, that control how the scene is imaged by the fovea, where resolution is highest. In this paper, we present the SaccadeCam framework for adaptively distributing resolution onto regions of interest in the scene. Our algorithm for adaptive resolution is a self-supervised network and we demonstrate results for end-to-end learning for monocular depth estimation. We also show preliminary results with a real …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Monocular depth estimation aims at estimating a pixelwise depth map for a single image, which has wide applications in scene understanding and autonomous driving. Existing supervised and unsupervised methods face great challenges. Supervised methods require large amounts of depth measurement data, which are generally difficult to obtain, while unsupervised methods are usually limited in estimation accuracy. Synthetic data generated by graphics engines provide a possible solution for collecting large amounts of depth data. However, the large domain gaps between synthetic and realistic data make…
Monocular depth estimation has been extensively explored based on deep learning, yet its accuracy and generalization ability still lag far behind the stereo-based methods. To tackle this, a few recent studies have proposed to supervise the monocular depth estimation network by distilling disparity maps as proxy ground-truths. However, these studies naively distill the stereo knowledge without considering the comparative advantages of stereo-based and monocular depth estimation methods. In this paper, we propose to selectively distill the disparity maps for more reliable proxy supervision. Spec…
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation approaches either ignore independently moving objects in the scene or need a separate segmentation step to identify them. We propose MonoDepthSeg to jointly estimate depth and segment moving objects from monocular video without using any ground-truth labels. We decompose the scene into a fixed number of components where each component corresponds to a region on the image with its own transformation matrix representing its motion. We estimate both the mask and the motion of each component efficiently with a shared encoder. We evaluate our method on thr…
Neural networks have shown great success in extracting geometric information from color images. Especially, monocular depth estimation networks are increasingly reliable in real-world scenes. In this work we investigate the applicability of such monocular depth estimation networks to semi-transparent volume rendered images. As depth is notoriously difficult to define in a volumetric scene without clearly defined surfaces, we consider different depth computations that have emerged in practice, and compare state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation approaches for these different interpretations…
Monocular image-based 3D perception has become an active research area in recent years owing to its applications in autonomous driving. Approaches to monocular 3D perception including detection and tracking, however, often yield inferior performance when compared to LiDAR-based techniques. Through systematic analysis, we identified that per-object depth estimation accuracy is a major factor bounding the performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose a multi-level fusion method that combines different representations (RGB and pseudo-LiDAR) and temporal information across multiple frames…
We present a generalised self-supervised learning approach for monocular estimation of the real depth across scenes with diverse depth ranges from 1--100s of meters. Existing supervised methods for monocular depth estimation require accurate depth measurements for training. This limitation has led to the introduction of self-supervised methods that are trained on stereo image pairs with a fixed camera baseline to estimate disparity which is transformed to depth given known calibration. Self-supervised approaches have demonstrated impressive results but do not generalise to scenes with differen…
Monocular depth estimation has been actively studied in fields such as robot vision, autonomous driving, and 3D scene understanding. Given a sequence of color images, unsupervised learning methods based on the framework of Structure-From-Motion (SfM) simultaneously predict depth and camera relative pose. However, dynamically moving objects in the scene violate the static world assumption, resulting in inaccurate depths of dynamic objects. In this work, we propose a new method to address such dynamic object movements through monocular 3D object detection. Specifically, we first detect 3D object…
Supervised deep learning often suffers from the lack of sufficient training data. Specifically in the context of monocular depth map prediction, it is barely possible to determine dense ground truth depth images in realistic dynamic outdoor environments. When using LiDAR sensors, for instance, noise is present in the distance measurements, the calibration between sensors cannot be perfect, and the measurements are typically much sparser than the camera images. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to depth map prediction from monocular images that learns in a semi-supervised way. While we…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Existing self-supervised monocular depth estimation methods can get rid of expensive annotations and achieve promising results. However, these methods suffer from severe performance degradation when directly adopting a model trained on a fixed resolution to evaluate at other different resolutions. In this paper, we propose a resolution adaptive self-supervised monocular depth estimation method (RA-Depth) by learning the scale invariance of the scene depth. Specifically, we propose a simple yet efficient data augmentation method to generate images with arbitrary scales for the same scene. Then,…
Korea University（高丽大学）；Gauss Labs Inc.（高斯实验室公司）；Dongguk University（东国大学）
We propose a novel algorithm for monocular depth estimation that decomposes a metric depth map into a normalized depth map and scale features. The proposed network is composed of a shared encoder and three decoders, called G-Net, N-Net, and M-Net, which estimate gradient maps, a normalized depth map, and a metric depth map, respectively. M-Net learns to estimate metric depths more accurately using relative depth features extracted by G-Net and N-Net. The proposed algorithm has the advantage that it can use datasets without metric depth labels to improve the performance of metric depth estimati…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Robotics at Google（谷歌机器人）；Waymo LLC（Waymo有限责任公司）
We present a method for jointly training the estimation of depth, ego-motion, and a dense 3D translation field of objects relative to the scene, with monocular photometric consistency being the sole source of supervision. We show that this apparently heavily underdetermined problem can be regularized by imposing the following prior knowledge about 3D translation fields: they are sparse, since most of the scene is static, and they tend to be constant for rigid moving objects. We show that this regularization alone is sufficient to train monocular depth prediction models that exceed the accuracy…
Monocular depth estimation plays a critical role in various computer vision and robotics applications such as localization, mapping, and 3D object detection. Recently, learning-based algorithms achieve huge success in depth estimation by training models with a large amount of data in a supervised manner. However, it is challenging to acquire dense ground truth depth labels for supervised training, and the unsupervised depth estimation using monocular sequences emerges as a promising alternative. Unfortunately, most studies on unsupervised depth estimation explore loss functions or occlusion ma…
Monocular depth estimation is an especially important task in robotics and autonomous driving, where 3D structural information is essential. However, extreme lighting conditions and complex surface objects make it difficult to predict depth in a single image. Therefore, to generate accurate depth maps, it is important for the model to learn structural information about the scene. We propose a novel Patch-Wise EdgeConv Module (PEM) and EdgeConv Attention Module (EAM) to solve the difficulty of monocular depth estimation. The proposed modules extract structural information by learning the relati…
This paper aims at understanding the role of multi-scale information in the estimation of depth from monocular images. More precisely, the paper investigates four different deep CNN architectures, designed to explicitly make use of multi-scale features along the network, and compare them to a state-of-the-art single-scale approach. The paper also shows that involving multi-scale features in depth estimation not only improves the performance in terms of accuracy, but also gives qualitatively better depth maps. Experiments are done on the widely used NYU Depth dataset, on which the proposed meth…
Recent advancements of neural networks lead to reliable monocular depth estimation. Monocular depth estimated techniques have the upper hand over traditional depth estimation techniques as it only needs one image during inference. Depth estimation is one of the essential tasks in robotics, and monocular depth estimation has a wide variety of safety-critical applications like in self-driving cars and surgical devices. Thus, the robustness of such techniques is very crucial. It has been shown in recent works that these deep neural networks are highly vulnerable to adversarial samples for tasks l…
Self-supervised learning for monocular depth estimation is widely investigated as an alternative to supervised learning approach, that requires a lot of ground truths. Previous works have successfully improved the accuracy of depth estimation by modifying the model structure, adding objectives, and masking dynamic objects and occluded area. However, when using such estimated depth image in applications, such as autonomous vehicles, and robots, we have to uniformly believe the estimated depth at each pixel position. This could lead to fatal errors in performing the tasks, because estimated dept…
