Accuracy of depth estimation from static images has been significantly improved recently, by exploiting hierarchical features from deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Compared with static images, vast information exists among video frames and can be exploited to improve the depth estimation performance. In this work, we focus on exploring temporal information from monocular videos for depth estimation. Specifically, we take the advantage of convolutional long short-term memory (CLSTM) and propose a novel spatial-temporal CSLTM (ST-CLSTM) structure. Our ST-CLSTM structure can capture not only the spatial features but also the temporal correlations/consistency among consecutive video frames with negligible increase in computational cost. Additionally, in order to maintain the temporal consistency among the estimated depth frames, we apply the generative adversarial learning scheme and design a temporal consistency loss. The temporal consistency loss is combined with the spatial loss to update the model in an end-to-end fashion. By taking advantage of the temporal information, we build a video depth estimation framework that runs in real-time and generates visually pleasant results. Moreover, our approach is flexible and can be generalized to most existing depth estimation frameworks. Code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/STCLSTM
Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；The Boeing Company（波音公司）
Beyond depth estimation from a single image, the monocular cue is useful in a broader range of depth inference applications and settings---such as when one can leverage other available depth cues for improved accuracy. Currently, different applications, with different inference tasks and combinations of depth cues, are solved via different specialized networks---trained separately for each application. Instead, we propose a versatile task-agnostic monocular model that outputs a probability distribution over scene depth given an input color image, as a sample approximation of outputs from a pat…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；DJI Technology（大疆创新科技有限公司）；Huawei（华为技术有限公司）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Multi-view depth estimation plays a critical role in reconstructing and understanding the 3D world. Recent learning-based methods have made significant progress in it. However, multi-view depth estimation is fundamentally a correspondence-based optimization problem, but previous learning-based methods mainly rely on predefined depth hypotheses to build correspondence as the cost volume and implicitly regularize it to fit depth prediction, deviating from the essence of iterative optimization based on stereo correspondence. Thus, they suffer unsatisfactory precision and generalization capability…
Korea University（高丽大学）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）
We propose MaskingDepth, a novel semi-supervised learning framework for monocular depth estimation to mitigate the reliance on large ground-truth depth quantities. MaskingDepth is designed to enforce consistency between the strongly-augmented unlabeled data and the pseudo-labels derived from weakly-augmented unlabeled data, which enables learning depth without supervision. In this framework, a novel data augmentation is proposed to take the advantage of a naive masking strategy as an augmentation, while avoiding its scale ambiguity problem between depths from weakly- and strongly-augmented bra…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Learning to reconstruct depths in a single image by watching unlabeled videos via deep convolutional network (DCN) is attracting significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we introduce a surface normal representation for unsupervised depth estimation framework. Our estimated depths are constrained to be compatible with predicted normals, yielding more robust geometry results. Specifically, we formulate an edge-aware depth-normal consistency term, and solve it by constructing a depth-to-normal layer and a normal-to-depth layer inside of the DCN. The depth-to-normal layer takes estima…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Temporal consistency is the key challenge of video depth estimation. Previous works are based on additional optical flow or camera poses, which is time-consuming. By contrast, we derive consistency with less information. Since videos inherently exist with heavy temporal redundancy, a missing frame could be recovered from neighboring ones. Inspired by this, we propose the frame masking network (FMNet), a spatial-temporal transformer network predicting the depth of masked frames based on their neighboring frames. By reconstructing masked temporal features, the FMNet can learn intrinsic inter-fra…
GeoSurDepth: Harnessing Foundation Model for Spatial Geometry Consistency-Oriented Self-Supervised Surround-View Depth Estimation
State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China（1 智能绿色车辆与移动国家重点实验室，车辆与移动学院，清华大学，北京100084，中国）；California PATH, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States（2 加州PATH，加州大学伯克利分校，加州，美国）
Inferring geometrically consistent dense 3D scenes across a tuple of temporally consecutive images remains challenging for self-supervised monocular depth prediction pipelines. This paper explores how the increasingly popular transformer architecture, together with novel regularized loss formulations, can improve depth consistency while preserving accuracy. We propose a spatial attention module that correlates coarse depth predictions to aggregate local geometric information. A novel temporal attention mechanism further processes the local geometric information in a global context across conse…
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Accurate stereo depth estimation plays a critical role in various 3D tasks in both indoor and outdoor environments. Recently, learning-based multi-view stereo methods have demonstrated competitive performance with a limited number of views. However, in challenging scenarios, especially when building cross-view correspondences is hard, these methods still cannot produce satisfying results. In this paper, we study how to leverage a normal estimation model and the predicted normal maps to improve the depth quality. We couple the learning of a multi-view normal estimation module and a multi-view d…
National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing（多光谱信息处理科学技术国家重点实验室）；School of Artifical Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）
In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-scale geometric consistency guided multi-view stereo method for accurate and complete depth map estimation. We first present our basic multi-view stereo method with Adaptive Checkerboard sampling and Multi-Hypothesis joint view selection (ACMH). It leverages structured region information to sample better candidate hypotheses for propagation and infer the aggregation view subset at each pixel. For the depth estimation of low-textured areas, we further propose to combine ACMH with multi-scale geometric consistency guidance (ACMM) to obtain the reliabl…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Shenzhen DJI Sciences and Technologies Ltd.（深圳市大疆创新科技有限公司）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Depth map estimation from images is an important task in robotic systems. Existing methods can be categorized into two groups including multi-view stereo and monocular depth estimation. The former requires cameras to have large overlapping areas and sufficient baseline between cameras, while the latter that processes each image independently can hardly guarantee the structure consistency between cameras. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-camera collaborative depth prediction method that does not require large overlapping areas while maintaining structure consistency between cameras. Spec…
In the current monocular depth research, the dominant approach is to employ unsupervised training on large datasets, driven by warped photometric consistency. Such approaches lack robustness and are unable to generalize to challenging domains such as nighttime scenes or adverse weather conditions where assumptions about photometric consistency break down. We propose DeFeat-Net (Depth & Feature network), an approach to simultaneously learn a cross-domain dense feature representation, alongside a robust depth-estimation framework based on warped feature consistency. The resulting feature represe…
FatesGS: Fast and Accurate Sparse-View Surface Reconstruction using Gaussian Splatting with Depth-Feature Consistency
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist), Tsinghua University（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心（BNRist），清华大学）；School of Software, Tsinghua University（清华大学软件学院）
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Everest Innovation Technology（珠峰创新科技）
Recent learning-based approaches, in which models are trained by single-view images have shown promising results for monocular 3D face reconstruction, but they suffer from the ill-posed face pose and depth ambiguity issue. In contrast to previous works that only enforce 2D feature constraints, we propose a self-supervised training architecture by leveraging the multi-view geometry consistency, which provides reliable constraints on face pose and depth estimation. We first propose an occlusion-aware view synthesis method to apply multi-view geometry consistency to self-supervised learning. Then…
$\mathrm{F^2Depth}$: Self-supervised Indoor Monocular Depth Estimation via Optical Flow Consistency and Feature Map Synthesis
Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学人工智能研究院）；Qingdao Research Institute of Beihang University（北京航空航天大学青岛研究院）；School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学自动化科学与电气工程学院）
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Reality Labs, Meta Inc.（Meta公司现实实验室）
Temporally consistent depth estimation is crucial for online applications such as augmented reality. While stereo depth estimation has received substantial attention as a promising way to generate 3D information, there is relatively little work focused on maintaining temporal stability. Indeed, based on our analysis, current techniques still suffer from poor temporal consistency. Stabilizing depth temporally in dynamic scenes is challenging due to concurrent object and camera motion. In an online setting, this process is further aggravated because only past frames are available. We present a f…
ConsistentNeRF: Enhancing Neural Radiance Fields with 3D Consistency for Sparse View Synthesis
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Towards Cross-View-Consistent Self-Supervised Surround Depth Estimation
School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）理工学院）；Insta360 Research（影石创新研究院）；school of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen Polytechnic University（深圳职业技术大学人工智能学院）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）
Most learning-based methods estimate ego-motion by utilizing visual sensors, which suffer from dramatic lighting variations and textureless scenarios. In this paper, we incorporate sparse but accurate depth measurements obtained from lidars to overcome the limitation of visual methods. To this end, we design a self-supervised visual-lidar odometry (Self-VLO) framework. It takes both monocular images and sparse depth maps projected from 3D lidar points as input, and produces pose and depth estimations in an end-to-end learning manner, without using any ground truth labels. To effectively fuse t…
As processing power has become more available, more human-like artificial intelligences are created to solve image processing tasks that we are inherently good at. As such we propose a model that estimates depth from a monocular image. Our approach utilizes a combination of structure from motion and stereo disparity. We estimate a pose between the source image and a different viewpoint and a dense depth map and use a simple transformation to reconstruct the image seen from said viewpoint. We can then use the real image at that viewpoint to act as supervision to train out model. The metric chos…
We propose a novel objective for penalizing geometric inconsistencies to improve the depth and pose estimation performance of monocular camera images. Our objective is designed using the Wasserstein distance between two point clouds, estimated from images with different camera poses. The Wasserstein distance can impose a soft and symmetric coupling between two point clouds, which suitably maintains geometric constraints and results in a differentiable objective. By adding our objective to the those of other state-of-the-art methods, we can effectively penalize geometric inconsistencies and obt…
Cross-Vehicle 3D Geometric Consistency for Self-Supervised Surround Depth Estimation on Articulated Vehicles
School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与运载学院）；Remote Sensing and Earth Observation Laboratory, University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学遥感与地球观测实验室）；California PATH, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校加州PATH）
Learning Fine-Grained Geometry for Sparse-View Splatting via Cascade Depth Loss
School of Computer Science The University of Sydney Sydney, Australia；School of Computer Science University of Bristol Bristol, United Kingdom；School of Science Edith Cowan University Perth, Australia
Learning based methods have shown very promising results for the task of depth estimation in single images. However, most existing approaches treat depth prediction as a supervised regression problem and as a result, require vast quantities of corresponding ground truth depth data for training. Just recording quality depth data in a range of environments is a challenging problem. In this paper, we innovate beyond existing approaches, replacing the use of explicit depth data during training with easier-to-obtain binocular stereo footage. We propose a novel training objective that enables our co…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Inceptio（嬴彻科技）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）
We present a novel method for single image depth estimation using surface normal constraints. Existing depth estimation methods either suffer from the lack of geometric constraints, or are limited to the difficulty of reliably capturing geometric context, which leads to a bottleneck of depth estimation quality. We therefore introduce a simple yet effective method, named Adaptive Surface Normal (ASN) constraint, to effectively correlate the depth estimation with geometric consistency. Our key idea is to adaptively determine the reliable local geometry from a set of randomly sampled candidates t…
Edge-aware Consistent Stereo Video Depth Estimation
K|Lens GmbH（K|Lens有限公司）；Saarland Informatics Campus（萨尔兰信息学园区）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；MPI Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
There has been tremendous research progress in estimating the depth of a scene from a monocular camera image. Existing methods for single-image depth prediction are exclusively based on deep neural networks, and their training can be unsupervised using stereo image pairs, supervised using LiDAR point clouds, or semi-supervised using both stereo and LiDAR. In general, semi-supervised training is preferred as it does not suffer from the weaknesses of either supervised training, resulting from the difference in the cameras and the LiDARs field of view, or unsupervised training, resulting from the…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Tencent YouTu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）；Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）
Monocular depth estimation aims at predicting depth from a single image or video. Recently, self-supervised methods draw much attention since they are free of depth annotations and achieve impressive performance on several daytime benchmarks. However, they produce weird outputs in more challenging nighttime scenarios because of low visibility and varying illuminations, which bring weak textures and break brightness-consistency assumption, respectively. To address these problems, in this paper we propose a novel framework with several improvements: (1) we introduce Priors-Based Regularization t…
NVDS+: Towards Efficient and Versatile Neural Stabilizer for Video Depth Estimation
School of AIA, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学AIA学院）；School of EIC, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学EIC学院）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）
With the development of computational intelligence algorithms, unsupervised monocular depth and pose estimation framework, which is driven by warped photometric consistency, has shown great performance in the daytime scenario. While in some challenging environments, like night and rainy night, the essential photometric consistency hypothesis is untenable because of the complex lighting and reflection, so that the above unsupervised framework cannot be directly applied to these complex scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the problem of unsupervised monocular depth estimation in highly comp…
Baillie Gifford Pandemic Science Hub（巴利尔·吉福德疫情科学中心）；Institute of Regeneration and Repair（再生与修复研究所）；Heriot-Watt University（赫罗特-瓦特大学）；Institute of Photonics and Quantum Science（光子与量子科学研究所）
Dense depth estimation is essential to scene-understanding for autonomous driving. However, recent self-supervised approaches on monocular videos suffer from scale-inconsistency across long sequences. Utilizing data from the ubiquitously copresent global positioning systems (GPS), we tackle this challenge by proposing a dynamically-weighted GPS-to-Scale (g2s) loss to complement the appearance-based losses. We emphasize that the GPS is needed only during the multimodal training, and not at inference. The relative distance between frames captured through the GPS provides a scale signal that is i…
School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）理工学院）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院（社会））
Unsupervised learning of depth from indoor monocular videos is challenging as the artificial environment contains many textureless regions. Fortunately, the indoor scenes are full of specific structures, such as planes and lines, which should help guide unsupervised depth learning. This paper proposes PLNet that leverages the plane and line priors to enhance the depth estimation. We first represent the scene geometry using local planar coefficients and impose the smoothness constraint on the representation. Moreover, we enforce the planar and linear consistency by randomly selecting some sets …
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Depth estimation from a single image is an active research topic in computer vision. The most accurate approaches are based on fully supervised learning models, which rely on a large amount of dense and high-resolution (HR) ground-truth depth maps. However, in practice, color images are usually captured with much higher resolution than depth maps, leading to the resolution-mismatched effect. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised framework to train a monocular depth estimation network to generate HR depth maps with resolution-mismatched supervision, i.e., the inputs are HR color i…
