Nighttime camera-based depth estimation is a highly challenging task, especially for autonomous driving applications, where accurate depth perception is essential for ensuring safe navigation. Models trained on daytime data often fail in the absence of precise but costly LiDAR. Even vision foundation models trained on large amounts of data are unreliable in low-light conditions. In this work, we aim to improve the reliability of perception systems at night time. To this end, we introduce Light Enhanced Depth (LED), a novel, cost-effective approach that significantly improves depth estimation in low-light environments by harnessing a pattern projected by high definition headlights available in modern vehicles. LED leads to significant performance boosts across multiple depth-estimation architectures (encoder-decoder, Adabins, DepthFormer, Depth Anything V2) both on synthetic and real datasets. Furthermore, increased performances beyond illuminated areas reveal a holistic enhancement in scene understanding. Finally, we release the Nighttime Synthetic Drive Dataset, a synthetic and photo-realistic nighttime dataset, which comprises 49,990 comprehensively annotated images.
TATA Consultancy Services（塔塔咨询服务公司）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；Edge Hill University（边山大学）
In this paper, we look into the problem of estimating per-pixel depth maps from unconstrained RGB monocular night-time images which is a difficult task that has not been addressed adequately in the literature. The state-of-the-art day-time depth estimation methods fail miserably when tested with night-time images due to a large domain shift between them. The usual photo metric losses used for training these networks may not work for night-time images due to the absence of uniform lighting which is commonly present in day-time images, making it a difficult problem to solve. We propose to solve …
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；DSO National Laboratories（新加坡国防科技研究院）；Yale-NUS College（耶鲁-新加坡国立大学学院）
Nighttime stereo depth estimation is still challenging, as assumptions associated with daytime lighting conditions do not hold any longer. Nighttime is not only about low-light and dense noise, but also about glow/glare, flares, non-uniform distribution of light, etc. One of the possible solutions is to train a network on night stereo images in a fully supervised manner. However, to obtain proper disparity ground-truths that are dense, independent from glare/glow, and have sufficiently far depth ranges is extremely intractable. To address the problem, we introduce a network joining day/night t…
Accurate depth estimation under adverse night conditions has practical impact and applications, such as on autonomous driving and rescue robots. In this work, we studied monocular depth estimation at night time in which various adverse weather, light, and different road conditions exist, with data captured in both RGB and event modalities. Event camera can better capture intensity changes by virtue of its high dynamic range (HDR), which is particularly suitable to be applied at adverse night conditions in which the amount of light is limited in the scene. Although event data can retain visual …
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…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院（AIR））；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）；Xi’an Research Institute of High-Tech（西安高新技术研究所）；Intel Labs China（英特尔中国研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）
Self-supervised depth estimation draws a lot of attention recently as it can promote the 3D sensing capabilities of self-driving vehicles. However, it intrinsically relies upon the photometric consistency assumption, which hardly holds during nighttime. Although various supervised nighttime image enhancement methods have been proposed, their generalization performance in challenging driving scenarios is not satisfactory. To this end, we propose the first method that jointly learns a nighttime image enhancer and a depth estimator, without using ground truth for either task. Our method tightly e…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Self-supervised deep learning methods for joint depth and ego-motion estimation can yield accurate trajectories without needing ground-truth training data. However, as they typically use photometric losses, their performance can degrade significantly when the assumptions these losses make (e.g. temporal illumination consistency, a static scene, and the absence of noise and occlusions) are violated. This limits their use for e.g. nighttime sequences, which tend to contain many point light sources (including on dynamic objects) and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in darker image regions. In this…
Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；National Engineering Laboratory of Deep Learning Technology and Application（深度学习技术及应用国家工程实验室）
Remarkable results have been achieved by DCNN based self-supervised depth estimation approaches. However, most of these approaches can only handle either day-time or night-time images, while their performance degrades for all-day images due to large domain shift and the variation of illumination between day and night images. To relieve these limitations, we propose a domain-separated network for self-supervised depth estimation of all-day images. Specifically, to relieve the negative influence of disturbing terms (illumination, etc.), we partition the information of day and night image pairs i…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Advanced Biomedical Instrumentation Centre（先进生物医学仪器中心）
In recent years, self-supervised monocular depth estimation has drawn much attention since it frees of depth annotations and achieved remarkable results on standard benchmarks. However, most of existing methods only focus on either daytime or nighttime images, thus their performance degrades on the other domain because of the large domain shift between daytime and nighttime images. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a two-branch network named GlocalFuse-Depth for self-supervised depth estimation of all-day images. The daytime and nighttime image in input image pair are fed into …
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…
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…
Synthetic-to-Real Self-supervised Robust Depth Estimation via Learning with Motion and Structure Priors
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；ASUS Intelligent Cloud Services（华硕智能云服务）；Guangdong Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Economy (SZ)（广东省人工智能与数字经济实验室（深圳））；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）
Deep Depth Estimation from Thermal Image: Dataset, Benchmark, and Challenges
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学计算机科学学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Pusan National University（釜山国立大学计算机科学与工程学院）
This work introduces an evaluation benchmark for depth estimation and completion using high-resolution depth measurements with angular resolution of up to 25" (arcsecond), akin to a 50 megapixel camera with per-pixel depth available. Existing datasets, such as the KITTI benchmark, provide only sparse reference measurements with an order of magnitude lower angular resolution - these sparse measurements are treated as ground truth by existing depth estimation methods. We propose an evaluation methodology in four characteristic automotive scenarios recorded in varying weather conditions (day, nig…
SelfOdom: Self-supervised Egomotion and Depth Learning via Bi-directional Coarse-to-Fine Scale Recovery
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学智能科学与技术学院）
Stairs are common building structures in urban environments, and stair detection is an important part of environment perception for autonomous mobile robots. Most existing algorithms have difficulty combining the visual information from binocular sensors effectively and ensuring reliable detection at night and in the case of extremely fuzzy visual clues. To solve these problems, we propose a neural network architecture with RGB and depth map inputs. Specifically, we design a selective module, which can make the network learn the complementary relationship between the RGB map and the depth map …
We integrate sparse radar data into a monocular depth estimation model and introduce a novel preprocessing method for reducing the sparseness and limited field of view provided by radar. We explore the intrinsic error of different radar modalities and show our proposed method results in more data points with reduced error. We further propose a novel method for estimating dense depth maps from monocular 2D images and sparse radar measurements using deep learning based on the deep ordinal regression network by Fu et al. Radar data are integrated by first converting the sparse 2D points to a heig…
Depth estimation is an important task, applied in various methods and applications of computer vision. While the traditional methods of estimating depth are based on depth cues and require specific equipment such as stereo cameras and configuring input according to the approach being used, the focus at the current time is on a single source, or monocular, depth estimation. The recent developments in Convolution Neural Networks along with the integration of classical methods in these deep learning approaches have led to a lot of advancements in the depth estimation problem. The problem of outdo…
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…
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
This work considers the problem of depth completion, with or without image data, where an algorithm may measure the depth of a prescribed limited number of pixels. The algorithmic challenge is to choose pixel positions strategically and dynamically to maximally reduce overall depth estimation error. This setting is realized in daytime or nighttime depth completion for autonomous vehicles with a programmable LiDAR. Our method uses an ensemble of predictors to define a sampling probability over pixels. This probability is proportional to the variance of the predictions of ensemble members, thus …
DASP: Self-supervised Nighttime Monocular Depth Estimation with Domain Adaptation of Spatiotemporal Priors
College of Computer Science and Technology, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Digital Future Lab, Flanders Make, Hasselt University（数字未来实验室，弗拉芒制造，哈塞尔特大学）；College of Engineering, Shantou University（汕头大学工程学院）；Hasselt University（哈塞尔特大学）
Obtaining accurate depth measurements out of a single image represents a fascinating solution to 3D sensing. CNNs led to considerable improvements in this field, and recent trends replaced the need for ground-truth labels with geometry-guided image reconstruction signals enabling unsupervised training. Currently, for this purpose, state-of-the-art techniques rely on images acquired with a binocular stereo rig to predict inverse depth (i.e., disparity) according to the aforementioned supervision principle. However, these methods suffer from well-known problems near occlusions, left image border…
Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Lehigh University（里海大学）
Depth estimation-based obstacle avoidance has been widely adopted by autonomous systems (drones and vehicles) for safety purpose. It normally relies on a stereo camera to automatically detect obstacles and make flying/driving decisions, e.g., stopping several meters ahead of the obstacle in the path or moving away from the detected obstacle. In this paper, we explore new security risks associated with the stereo vision-based depth estimation algorithms used for obstacle avoidance. By exploiting the weaknesses of the stereo matching in depth estimation algorithms and the lens flare effect in op…
Information Technologies Institute (ITI), Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH)（希腊研究与技术中心（CERTH）信息技术研究所（ITI））；Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)（马德里理工大学（UPM））
Learning based approaches for depth perception are limited by the availability of clean training data. This has led to the utilization of view synthesis as an indirect objective for learning depth estimation using efficient data acquisition procedures. Nonetheless, most research focuses on pinhole based monocular vision, with scarce works presenting results for omnidirectional input. In this work, we explore spherical view synthesis for learning monocular 360 depth in a self-supervised manner and demonstrate its feasibility. Under a purely geometrically derived formulation we present results f…
National Tsing Hua University（清华大学）；National Chiao Tung University（交通大学）；NEC Labs America（美国NEC实验室）
Although significant progress has been made in room layout estimation, most methods aim to reduce the loss in the 2D pixel coordinate rather than exploiting the room structure in the 3D space. Towards reconstructing the room layout in 3D, we formulate the task of 360 layout estimation as a problem of predicting depth on the horizon line of a panorama. Specifically, we propose the Differentiable Depth Rendering procedure to make the conversion from layout to depth prediction differentiable, thus making our proposed model end-to-end trainable while leveraging the 3D geometric information, withou…
For advanced driver assistance systems, it is crucial to have information about oncoming vehicles as early as possible. At night, this task is especially difficult due to poor lighting conditions. For that, during nighttime, every vehicle uses headlamps to improve sight and therefore ensure safe driving. As humans, we intuitively assume oncoming vehicles before the vehicles are actually physically visible by detecting light reflections caused by their headlamps. In this paper, we present a novel dataset containing 59746 annotated grayscale images out of 346 different scenes in a rural environm…
In this paper, we propose a thermal-infrared simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system enhanced by sparse depth measurements from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). Thermal-infrared cameras are relatively robust against fog, smoke, and dynamic lighting conditions compared to RGB cameras operating under the visible spectrum. Due to the advantages of thermal-infrared cameras, exploiting them for motion estimation and mapping is highly appealing. However, operating a thermal-infrared camera directly in existing vision-based methods is difficult because of the modality difference. This…
A thermal camera can robustly capture thermal radiation images under harsh light conditions such as night scenes, tunnels, and disaster scenarios. However, despite this advantage, neither depth nor ego-motion estimation research for the thermal camera have not been actively explored so far. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning method for depth and ego-motion estimation from thermal images. The proposed method exploits multi-spectral consistency that consists of temperature and photometric consistency loss. The temperature consistency loss provides a fundamental self-supervisory…
Recent work indicates that, besides being a challenge in producing perceptually pleasing images, low light proves more difficult for machine cognition than previously thought. In our work, we take a closer look at object detection in low light. First, to support the development and evaluation of new methods in this domain, we present a high-quality large-scale Night Object Detection (NOD) dataset showing dynamic scenes captured on the streets at night. Next, we directly link the lighting conditions to perceptual difficulty and identify what makes low light problematic for machine cognition. Ac…
Multi-Knowledge-oriented Nighttime Haze Imaging Enhancer for Vision-driven Intelligent Systems
School of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies（物流与海事研究系）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Chengdu Union Big Data Tech Inc.（成都联合大数据科技有限公司）
Night photography typically suffers from both low light and blurring issues due to the dim environment and the common use of long exposure. While existing light enhancement and deblurring methods could deal with each problem individually, a cascade of such methods cannot work harmoniously to cope well with joint degradation of visibility and textures. Training an end-to-end network is also infeasible as no paired data is available to characterize the coexistence of low light and blurs. We address the problem by introducing a novel data synthesis pipeline that models realistic low-light blurrin…
Light the Night: A Multi-Condition Diffusion Framework for Unpaired Low-Light Enhancement in Autonomous Driving
Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局前沿人工智能研究中心）；New York University（纽约大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
本文提出 LightDiff 多条件扩散框架，通过非配对动态退化、多模态适配器和感知奖励强化学习，增强夜间驾驶图像并提升 3D 检测性能。
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
We conduct a thorough study of photometric stereo under nearby point light source illumination, from modeling to numerical solution, through calibration. In the classical formulation of photometric stereo, the luminous fluxes are assumed to be directional, which is very difficult to achieve in practice. Rather, we use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the scene to reconstruct. Such point light sources are very convenient to use, yet they yield a more complex photometric stereo model which is arduous to solve. We first derive in a physically sound manner this model, and show how to cal…
INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes（法国国立信息学与自动化研究院格勒诺布尔罗讷-阿尔卑斯研究中心）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；D View Solutions（4D View Solutions公司）
Time-of-flight (TOF) cameras are sensors that can measure the depths of scene-points, by illuminating the scene with a controlled laser or LED source, and then analyzing the reflected light. In this paper, we will first describe the underlying measurement principles of time-of-flight cameras, including: (i) pulsed-light cameras, which measure directly the time taken for a light pulse to travel from the device to the object and back again, and (ii) continuous-wave modulated-light cameras, which measure the phase difference between the emitted and received signals, and hence obtain the travel ti…
A novel approach towards depth map super-resolution using multi-view uncalibrated photometric stereo is presented. Practically, an LED light source is attached to a commodity RGB-D sensor and is used to capture objects from multiple viewpoints with unknown motion. This non-static camera-to-object setup is described with a nonconvex variational approach such that no calibration on lighting or camera motion is required due to the formulation of an end-to-end joint optimization problem. Solving the proposed variational model results in high resolution depth, reflectance and camera pose estimates,…
Structure-Centric Robust Monocular Depth Estimation via Knowledge Distillation
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Institute of Computing Technology Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Guangdong Hong Kong Macao Greater Bay Area National Technology Innovation Center（粤港澳大湾区国家技术创新中心）；Shouguang Cheng Zhi Feng Xing Technology Co., Ltd（寿光诚智丰兴科技有限公司）
BEVScope: Enhancing Self-Supervised Depth Estimation Leveraging Bird's-Eye-View in Dynamic Scenarios
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
