As processing power has become more available, more human-like artificial intelligences are created to solve image processing tasks that we are inherently good at. As such we propose a model that estimates depth from a monocular image. Our approach utilizes a combination of structure from motion and stereo disparity. We estimate a pose between the source image and a different viewpoint and a dense depth map and use a simple transformation to reconstruct the image seen from said viewpoint. We can then use the real image at that viewpoint to act as supervision to train out model. The metric chosen for image comparison employs standard L1 and structural similarity and a consistency constraint between depth maps as well as smoothness constraint. We show that similar to human perception utilizing the correlation within the provided data by two different approaches increases the accuracy and outperforms the individual components.
The proposed model consists of two major components. The pose estimator yields an approximate relative camera pose between two training images. The depth estimator gives a dense depth map of an image. By combining these two parts the need for supervised input data can be eliminated. The depth estimator is mainly inspired by the stereo disparity approach of @cite_29 while the pose estimator is loosely related to the structure from motion approach of @cite_30 .
@cite_30 @cite_29
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We present an unsupervised learning framework for the task of monocular depth and camera motion estimation from unstructured video sequences. We achieve this by simultaneously training depth and camera pose estimation networks using the task of view synthesis as the supervisory signal. The networks are thus coupled via the view synthesis objective during training, but can be applied independently at test time. Empirical evaluation on the KITTI dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach: 1) monocular depth performing comparably with supervised methods that use either ground-truth pose or depth for training, and 2) pose estimation performing favorably with established SLAM systems under comparable input settings. Learning based methods have shown very promising results for the task of depth estimation in single images. However, most existing approaches treat depth prediction as a supervised regression problem and as a result, require vast quantities of corresponding ground truth depth data for training. Just recording quality depth data in a range of environments is a challenging problem. In this paper, we innovate beyond existing approaches, replacing the use of explicit depth data during training with easier-to-obtain binocular stereo footage. We propose a novel training objective that enables our convolutional neural network to learn to perform single image depth estimation, despite the absence of ground truth depth data. Exploiting epipolar geometry constraints, we generate disparity images by training our network with an image reconstruction loss. We show that solving for image reconstruction alone results in poor quality depth images. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel training loss that enforces consistency between the disparities produced relative to both the left and right images, leading to improved performance and robustness compared to existing approaches. Our method produces state of the art results for monocular depth estimation on the KITTI driving dataset, even outperforming supervised methods that have been trained with ground truth depth.