We study the problem of estimating the relative depth order of point pairs in a monocular image. Recent advances mainly focus on using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) to learn and infer the ordinal information from multiple contextual information of the points pair such as global scene context, local contextual information, and the locations. However, it remains unclear how much each context contributes to the task. To address this, we first examine the contribution of each context cue [1], [2] to the performance in the context of depth order estimation. We find out the local context surrounding the points pair contributes the most and the global scene context helps little. Based on the findings, we propose a simple method, using a multi-scale densely-connected network to tackle the task. Instead of learning the global structure, we dedicate to explore the local structure by learning to regress from regions of multiple sizes around the point pairs. Moreover, we use the recent densely connected network [3] to encourage substantial feature reuse as well as deepen our network to boost the performance. We show in experiments that the results of our approach is on par with or better than the state-of-the-art methods with the benefit of using only a small number of training data.
Recently, due to the wide adoption of affordable depth sensors, datasets such as the NYU Depth dataset @cite_5 and KITTI dataset @cite_33 @cite_10 become available, thus leading to the trend of solving the problem as a supervised learning task using CNN. Pioneering work of @cite_7 proposed an end-to-end system to estimate the depth order of points pairs. Compared with another ordinal estimation work which also utilized CNN @cite_15 , add one more bounding box which contains the important visual cues for the task and a different location expression in their network structure. We consider such the design very practical, which makes the visual cues be automatically learned and inferred by CNN. Since the NYU and KITTI datasets have no direct annotations for the task, @cite_6 proposed a dataset named Depth in the Wild (DIW) which annotated the ordinal depth information between point pairs. Their deep model is an deep ranking model, and the output is a relative depth map.
@cite_33 @cite_7 @cite_6 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_10
2760112017 2964014680 2888634437 2963045776
We consider the problem of dense depth prediction from a sparse set of depth measurements and a single RGB image. Since depth estimation from monocular images alone is inherently ambiguous and unreliable, to attain a higher level of robustness and accuracy, we introduce additional sparse depth samples, which are either acquired with a low-resolution depth sensor or computed via visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms. We propose the use of a single deep regression network to learn directly from the RGB-D raw data, and explore the impact of number of depth samples on prediction accuracy. Our experiments show that, compared to using only RGB images, the addition of 100 spatially random depth samples reduces the prediction root-mean-square error by 50 on the NYU-Depth-v2 indoor dataset. It also boosts the percentage of reliable prediction from 59 to 92 on the KITTI dataset. We demonstrate two applications of the proposed algorithm: a plug-in module in SLAM to convert sparse maps to dense maps, and super-resolution for LiDARs. Software and video demonstration are publicly available. Recent works have shown the benefit of integrating Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) models into deep architectures for improving pixel-level prediction tasks. Following this line of research, in this paper we introduce a novel approach for monocular depth estimation. Similarly to previous works, our method employs a continuous CRF to fuse multi-scale information derived from different layers of a front-end Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Differently from past works, our approach benefits from a structured attention model which automatically regulates the amount of information transferred between corresponding features at different scales. Importantly, the proposed attention model is seamlessly integrated into the CRF, allowing end-to-end training of the entire architecture. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method which is competitive with previous methods on the KITTI benchmark and outperforms the state of the art on the NYU Depth V2 dataset. Dense depth cues are important and have wide applications in various computer vision tasks. In autonomous driving, LIDAR sensors are adopted to acquire depth measurements around the vehicle to perceive the surrounding environments. However, depth maps obtained by LIDAR are generally sparse because of its hardware limitation. The task of depth completion attracts increasing attention, which aims at generating a dense depth map from an input sparse depth map. To effectively utilize multi-scale features, we propose three novel sparsity-invariant operations, based on which, a sparsity-invariant multi-scale encoder-decoder network (HMS-Net) for handling sparse inputs and sparse feature maps is also proposed. Additional RGB features could be incorporated to further improve the depth completion performance. Our extensive experiments and component analysis on two public benchmarks, KITTI depth completion benchmark and NYU-depth-v2 dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. As of Aug. 12th, 2018, on KITTI depth completion leaderboard, our proposed model without RGB guidance ranks first among all peer-reviewed methods without using RGB information, and our model with RGB guidance ranks second among all RGB-guided methods. We consider the problem of dense depth prediction from a sparse set of depth measurements and a single RGB image. Since depth estimation from monocular images alone is inherently ambiguous and unreliable, to attain a higher level of robustness and accuracy, we introduce additional sparse depth samples, which are either acquired with a low-resolution depth sensor or computed via visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms. We propose the use of a single deep regression network to learn directly from the RGB-D raw data, and explore the impact of number of depth samples on prediction accuracy. Our experiments show that, compared to using only RGB images, the addition of 100 spatially random depth samples reduces the prediction root-mean-square error by 50 on the NYU-Depth-v2 indoor dataset. It also boosts the percentage of reliable prediction from 59 to 92 on the KITTI dataset. We demonstrate two applications of the proposed algorithm: a plug-in module in SLAM to convert sparse maps to dense maps, and super-resolution for LiDARs. Software22https: github.com fangchangma sparse-to-dense and video demonstration33https: www.youtube.com watch?v=vNIIT_M7×7Y are publicly available.