Despite the remarkable success of modern monocular depth estimation methods, the accuracy achievable from a single image is limited, making it is practically useful to incorporate other sources of depth information. Currently, depth estimation from different combinations of sources are treated as different applications, and solved via separate networks trained to use the set of available sources as input for each application. In this paper, we propose a common versatile model that outputs a probability distribution over scene depth given an input color image, as a sample approximation using outputs from a conditional GAN. This distributional output is useful even in the monocular setting, and can be used to estimate depth, pairwise ordering, etc. More importantly, these outputs can be combined with a variety of other depth cues---such as user guidance and partial measurements---for use in different application settings, without retraining. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through experiments on the NYUv2 dataset for a number of tasks, and find that our results from a common model, trained only once, are comparable to those from state-of-the-art methods with separate task-specific models.
Monocular depth estimators commonly output a single estimate of the depth value at each pixel, preventing their use in different estimation settings. Some existing methods do produce distributional outputs, but as per-pixel variance maps @cite_41 @cite_45 or per-pixel probability distributions @cite_55 . Note that depth values at different locations are not statistically independent, i.e., different values at different locations may be plausible independently, but not in combination. Thus, per-pixel distributions provide only a limited characterization that, while useful in some applications, can not be used more generally, , to infer relative depth, or spatially propagate information from sparse measurements.
@cite_41 @cite_55 @cite_45
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Depth estimation from single monocular images is a key component of scene understanding and has benefited largely from deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) recently. In this article, we take advantage of the recent deep residual networks and propose a simple yet effective approach to this problem. We formulate depth estimation as a pixel-wise classification task. Specifically, we first discretize the continuous depth values into multiple bins and label the bins according to their depth range. Then we train fully convolutional deep residual networks to predict the depth label of each pixel. Performing discrete depth label classification instead of continuous depth value regression allows us to predict a confidence in the form of probability distribution. We further apply fully-connected conditional random fields (CRF) as a post processing step to enforce local smoothness interactions, which improves the results. We evaluate our approach on both indoor and outdoor datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance. A single color image can contain many cues informative towards different aspects of local geometric structure. We approach the problem of monocular depth estimation by using a neural network to produce a mid-level representation that summarizes these cues. This network is trained to characterize local scene geometry by predicting, at every image location, depth derivatives of different orders, orientations and scales. However, instead of a single estimate for each derivative, the network outputs probability distributions that allow it to express confidence about some coefficients, and ambiguity about others. Scene depth is then estimated by harmonizing this overcomplete set of network predictions, using a globalization procedure that finds a single consistent depth map that best matches all the local derivative distributions. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through evaluation on the NYU v2 depth data set. A single color image can contain many cues informative towards different aspects of local geometric structure. We approach the problem of monocular depth estimation by using a neural network to produce a mid-level representation that summarizes these cues. This network is trained to characterize local scene geometry by predicting, at every image location, depth derivatives of different orders, orientations and scales. However, instead of a single estimate for each derivative, the network outputs probability distributions that allow it to express confidence about some coefficients, and ambiguity about others. Scene depth is then estimated by harmonizing this overcomplete set of network predictions, using a globalization procedure that finds a single consistent depth map that best matches all the local derivative distributions. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through evaluation on the NYU v2 depth data set. 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.