Supervised depth estimation has achieved high accuracy due to the advanced deep network architectures. Since the groundtruth depth labels are hard to obtain, recent methods try to learn depth estimation networks in an unsupervised way by exploring unsupervised cues, which are effective but less reliable than true labels. An emerging way to resolve this dilemma is to transfer knowledge from synthetic images with ground truth depth via domain adaptation techniques. However, these approaches overlook specific geometric structure of the natural images in the target domain (i.e., real data), which is important for high-performing depth prediction. Motivated by the observation, we propose a geometry-aware symmetric domain adaptation framework (GASDA) to explore the labels in the synthetic data and epipolar geometry in the real data jointly. Moreover, by training two image style translators and depth estimators symmetrically in an end-to-end network, our model achieves better image style transfer and generates high-quality depth maps. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and comparable performance against the state-of-the-art. Code will be publicly available at: this https URL.
Coming to domain adaptation for depth estimation, Atapour @cite_24 developed a two-stage framework. In specific, they first learned a translator to stylize the natural images so as to make them indistinguishable with the synthetic images, and then trained a depth estimation network using the original synthetic images in a supervised manner. Kundu @cite_57 proposed a content congruent regularization method to tackle the model collapse issue caused by domain adaptation in high dimensional feature space. Recently, Zheng @cite_33 developed an end-to-end adaptation network, i.e. @math , where the translation network and the depth estimation network are optimized jointly so that they can improve each other. However, these works overlooked the geometric structure of the natural images from the target domain, which has been demonstrated significant for depth estimation @cite_45 @cite_4 . Motivated by the observation, we propose a novel geometry-aware symmetric domain adaptation network, i.e. , GASDA, by exploiting the epipolar geometry of the stereo images. The differences between GASDA and previous depth adaptation approaches @cite_57 @cite_33 are shown in Figure .
@cite_4 @cite_33 @cite_24 @cite_57 @cite_45
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A significant weakness of most current deep Convolutional Neural Networks is the need to train them using vast amounts of manu- ally labelled data. In this work we propose a unsupervised framework to learn a deep convolutional neural network for single view depth predic- tion, without requiring a pre-training stage or annotated ground truth depths. We achieve this by training the network in a manner analogous to an autoencoder. At training time we consider a pair of images, source and target, with small, known camera motion between the two such as a stereo pair. We train the convolutional encoder for the task of predicting the depth map for the source image. To do so, we explicitly generate an inverse warp of the target image using the predicted depth and known inter-view displacement, to reconstruct the source image; the photomet- ric error in the reconstruction is the reconstruction loss for the encoder. The acquisition of this training data is considerably simpler than for equivalent systems, requiring no manual annotation, nor calibration of depth sensor to camera. We show that our network trained on less than half of the KITTI dataset (without any further augmentation) gives com- parable performance to that of the state of art supervised methods for single view depth estimation. Current methods for single-image depth estimation use training datasets with real image-depth pairs or stereo pairs, which are not easy to acquire. We propose a framework, trained on synthetic image-depth pairs and unpaired real images, that comprises an image translation network for enhancing realism of input images, followed by a depth prediction network. A key idea is having the first network act as a wide-spectrum input translator, taking in either synthetic or real images, and ideally producing minimally modified realistic images. This is done via a reconstruction loss when the training input is real, and GAN loss when synthetic, removing the need for heuristic self-regularization. The second network is trained on a task loss for synthetic image-depth pairs, with extra GAN loss to unify real and synthetic feature distributions. Importantly, the framework can be trained end-to-end, leading to good results, even surpassing early deep-learning methods that use real paired data. Monocular depth estimation using learning-based approaches has become promising in recent years. However, most monocular depth estimators either need to rely on large quantities of ground truth depth data, which is extremely expensive and difficult to obtain, or predict disparity as an intermediary step using a secondary supervisory signal leading to blurring and other artefacts. Training a depth estimation model using pixel-perfect synthetic data can resolve most of these issues but introduces the problem of domain bias. This is the inability to apply a model trained on synthetic data to real-world scenarios. With advances in image style transfer and its connections with domain adaptation (Maximum Mean Discrepancy), we take advantage of style transfer and adversarial training to predict pixel perfect depth from a single real-world color image based on training over a large corpus of synthetic environment data. Experimental results indicate the efficacy of our approach compared to contemporary state-of-the-art techniques. Supervised deep learning methods have shown promising results for the task of monocular depth estimation; but acquiring ground truth is costly, and prone to noise as well as inaccuracies. While synthetic datasets have been used to circumvent above problems, the resultant models do not generalize well to natural scenes due to the inherent domain shift. Recent adversarial approaches for domain adaption have performed well in mitigating the differences between the source and target domains. But these methods are mostly limited to a classification setup and do not scale well for fully-convolutional architectures. In this work, we propose AdaDepth - an unsupervised domain adaptation strategy for the pixel-wise regression task of monocular depth estimation. The proposed approach is devoid of above limitations through a) adversarial learning and b) explicit imposition of content consistency on the adapted target representation. Our unsupervised approach performs competitively with other established approaches on depth estimation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art results in a semi-supervised setting.