We present a visual-inertial depth estimation pipeline that integrates monocular depth estimation and visual-inertial odometry to produce dense depth estimates with metric scale. Our approach performs global scale and shift alignment against sparse metric depth, followed by learning-based dense alignment. We evaluate on the TartanAir and VOID datasets, observing up to 30% reduction in inverse RMSE with dense scale alignment relative to performing just global alignment alone. Our approach is especially competitive at low density; with just 150 sparse metric depth points, our dense-to-dense depth alignment method achieves over 50% lower iRMSE over sparse-to-dense depth completion by KBNet, currently the state of the art on VOID. We demonstrate successful zero-shot transfer from synthetic TartanAir to real-world VOID data and perform generalization tests on NYUv2 and VCU-RVI. Our approach is modular and is compatible with a variety of monocular depth estimation models. Video: https://youtu.be/IMwiKwSpshQ Code: https://github.com/isl-org/VI-Depth
VIMD: Monocular Visual-Inertial Motion and Depth Estimation
University of Delaware (UD) College of Engineering（德克萨斯大学达勒姆分校工程学院）；University of Delaware（德克萨斯大学达勒姆分校）；Robot Perception and Navigation Group (RPNG)（机器人感知与导航小组）
Visual-inertial odometry (VIO) is the pose estimation backbone for most AR/VR and autonomous robotic systems today, in both academia and industry. However, these systems are highly sensitive to the initialization of key parameters such as sensor biases, gravity direction, and metric scale. In practical scenarios where high-parallax or variable acceleration assumptions are rarely met (e.g. hovering aerial robot, smartphone AR user not gesticulating with phone), classical visual-inertial initialization formulations often become ill-conditioned and/or fail to meaningfully converge. In this paper …
This paper presents an self-supervised deep learning network for monocular visual inertial odometry (named DeepVIO). DeepVIO provides absolute trajectory estimation by directly merging 2D optical flow feature (OFF) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. Specifically, it firstly estimates the depth and dense 3D point cloud of each scene by using stereo sequences, and then obtains 3D geometric constraints including 3D optical flow and 6-DoF pose as supervisory signals. Note that such 3D optical flow shows robustness and accuracy to dynamic objects and textureless environments. In DeepVIO trai…
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…
We present a novel algorithm for self-supervised monocular depth completion. Our approach is based on training a neural network that requires only sparse depth measurements and corresponding monocular video sequences without dense depth labels. Our self-supervised algorithm is designed for challenging indoor environments with textureless regions, glossy and transparent surface, non-Lambertian surfaces, moving people, longer and diverse depth ranges and scenes captured by complex ego-motions. Our novel architecture leverages both deep stacks of sparse convolution blocks to extract sparse depth …
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；The University of Technology, Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Many standard robotic platforms are equipped with at least a fixed 2D laser range finder and a monocular camera. Although those platforms do not have sensors for 3D depth sensing capability, knowledge of depth is an essential part in many robotics activities. Therefore, recently, there is an increasing interest in depth estimation using monocular images. As this task is inherently ambiguous, the data-driven estimated depth might be unreliable in robotics applications. In this paper, we have attempted to improve the precision of monocular depth estimation by introducing 2D planar observation fr…
In this paper, we propose a Bidirectional Attention Network (BANet), an end-to-end framework for monocular depth estimation (MDE) that addresses the limitation of effectively integrating local and global information in convolutional neural networks. The structure of this mechanism derives from a strong conceptual foundation of neural machine translation, and presents a light-weight mechanism for adaptive control of computation similar to the dynamic nature of recurrent neural networks. We introduce bidirectional attention modules that utilize the feed-forward feature maps and incorporate the g…
We propose a semi-supervised learning framework for monocular depth estimation. Compared to existing semi-supervised learning methods, which inherit limitations of both sparse supervised and unsupervised loss functions, we achieve the complementary advantages of both loss functions, by building two separate network branches for each loss and distilling each other through the mutual distillation loss function. We also present to apply different data augmentation to each branch, which improves the robustness. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework over the lates…
Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón (I3A)（阿拉贡工程研究所）；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
We present a generic framework for scale-aware direct monocular odometry based on depth prediction from a deep neural network. In contrast with previous methods where depth information is only partially exploited, we formulate a novel depth prediction residual which allows us to incorporate multi-view depth information. In addition, we propose to use a truncated robust cost function which prevents considering inconsistent depth estimations. The photometric and depth-prediction measurements are integrated into a tightly-coupled optimization leading to a scale-aware monocular system which does n…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Bogazici University（博阿齐奇大学）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）
In the last decade, numerous supervised deep learning approaches requiring large amounts of labeled data have been proposed for visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and depth map estimation. To overcome the data limitation, self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising alternative, exploiting constraints such as geometric and photometric consistency in the scene. In this study, we introduce a novel self-supervised deep learning-based VIO and depth map recovery approach (SelfVIO) using adversarial training and self-adaptive visual-inertial sensor fusion. SelfVIO learns to jointly estimate 6 deg…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Monocular depth estimation can play an important role in addressing the issue of deriving scene geometry from 2D images. It has been used in a variety of industries, including robots, self-driving cars, scene comprehension, 3D reconstructions, and others. The goal of our method is to create a lightweight machine-learning model in order to predict the depth value of each pixel given only a single RGB image as input with the Unet structure of the image segmentation network. We use the NYU Depth V2 dataset to test the structure and compare the result with other methods. The proposed method achiev…
University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；Czech Technical University（捷克理工大学）；Tampere University（坦佩雷大学）
Recovering the scene depth from a single image is an ill-posed problem that requires additional priors, often referred to as monocular depth cues, to disambiguate different 3D interpretations. In recent works, those priors have been learned in an end-to-end manner from large datasets by using deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose guiding depth estimation to favor planar structures that are ubiquitous especially in indoor environments. This is achieved by incorporating a non-local coplanarity constraint to the network with a novel attention mechanism called depth-attention volume (DAV…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
This paper reports a new continuous 3D loss function for learning depth from monocular images. The dense depth prediction from a monocular image is supervised using sparse LIDAR points, which enables us to leverage available open source datasets with camera-LIDAR sensor suites during training. Currently, accurate and affordable range sensor is not readily available. Stereo cameras and LIDARs measure depth either inaccurately or sparsely/costly. In contrast to the current point-to-point loss evaluation approach, the proposed 3D loss treats point clouds as continuous objects; therefore, it compe…
University of Alicante（阿利坎特大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Microsoft（微软）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Building upon the recent progress in novel view synthesis, we propose its application to improve monocular depth estimation. In particular, we propose a novel training method split in three main steps. First, the prediction results of a monocular depth network are warped to an additional view point. Second, we apply an additional image synthesis network, which corrects and improves the quality of the warped RGB image. The output of this network is required to look as similar as possible to the ground-truth view by minimizing the pixel-wise RGB reconstruction error. Third, we reapply the same m…
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…
