The success of existing deep-learning based multi-view stereo (MVS) approaches greatly depends on the availability of large-scale supervision in the form of dense depth maps. Such supervision, while not always possible, tends to hinder the generalization ability of the learned models in never-seen-before scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first unsupervised learning based MVS network, which learns the multi-view depth maps from the input multi-view images and does not need ground-truth 3D training data. Our network is symmetric in predicting depth maps for all views simultaneously, where we enforce cross-view consistency of multi-view depth maps during both training and testing stages. Thus, the learned multi-view depth maps naturally comply with the underlying 3D scene geometry. Besides, our network also learns the multi-view occlusion maps, which further improves the robustness of our network in handling real-world occlusions. Experimental results on multiple benchmarking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our network and the excellent generalization ability.
We present an unsupervised learning framework for the task of monocular depth and camera motion estimation from unstructured video sequences. In common with recent work [10, 14, 16], we use an end-to-end learning approach with view synthesis as the supervisory signal. In contrast to the previous work, our method is completely unsupervised, requiring only monocular video sequences for training. Our method uses single-view depth and multiview pose networks, with a loss based on warping nearby views to the target using the computed depth and pose. The networks are thus coupled by the loss 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 performs comparably with supervised methods that use either ground-truth pose or depth for training, and 2) pose estimation performs favorably compared to established SLAM systems under comparable input settings. Deep Learning based stereo matching methods have shown great successes and achieved top scores across different benchmarks. However, like most data-driven methods, existing deep stereo matching networks suffer from some well-known drawbacks such as requiring large amount of labeled training data, and that their performances are fundamentally limited by the generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that takes a continuous (possibly previously unseen) stereo video as input, and directly predicts a depth-map at each frame without a pre-training process, and without the need of ground-truth depth-maps as supervision. Thanks to the recurrent nature (provided by two convolutional-LSTM blocks), our network is able to memorize and learn from its past experiences, and modify its inner parameters (network weights) to adapt to previously unseen or unfamiliar environments. This suggests a remarkable generalization ability of the net, making it applicable in an open world setting. Our method works robustly with changes in scene content, image statistics, and lighting and season conditions etc. By extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method seamlessly adapts between different scenarios. Equally important, in terms of the stereo matching accuracy, it outperforms state-of-the-art deep stereo approaches on standard benchmark datasets such as KITTI and Middlebury stereo. We present a novel approach for unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion from monocular video. Unsupervised learning removes the need for separate supervisory signals (depth or ego-motion ground truth, or multi-view video). Prior work in unsupervised depth learning uses pixel-wise or gradient-based losses, which only consider pixels in small local neighborhoods. Our main contribution is to explicitly consider the inferred 3D geometry of the whole scene, and enforce consistency of the estimated 3D point clouds and ego-motion across consecutive frames. This is a challenging task and is solved by a novel (approximate) backpropagation algorithm for aligning 3D structures. We combine this novel 3D-based loss with 2D losses based on photometric quality of frame reconstructions using estimated depth and ego-motion from adjacent frames. We also incorporate validity masks to avoid penalizing areas in which no useful information exists. We test our algorithm on the KITTI dataset and on a video dataset captured on an uncalibrated mobile phone camera. Our proposed approach consistently improves depth estimates on both datasets, and outperforms the state-of-the-art for both depth and ego-motion. Because we only require a simple video, learning depth and ego-motion on large and varied datasets becomes possible. We demonstrate this by training on the low quality uncalibrated video dataset and evaluating on KITTI, ranking among top performing prior methods which are trained on KITTI itself.1 Exiting deep-learning based dense stereo matching methods often rely on ground-truth disparity maps as the training signals, which are however not always available in many situations. In this paper, we design a simple convolutional neural network architecture that is able to learn to compute dense disparity maps directly from the stereo inputs. Training is performed in an end-to-end fashion without the need of ground-truth disparity maps. The idea is to use image warping error (instead of disparity-map residuals) as the loss function to drive the learning process, aiming to find a depth-map that minimizes the warping error. While this is a simple concept well-known in stereo matching, to make it work in a deep-learning framework, many non-trivial challenges must be overcome, and in this work we provide effective solutions. Our network is self-adaptive to different unseen imageries as well as to different camera settings. Experiments on KITTI and Middlebury stereo benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms many state-of-the-art stereo matching methods with a margin, and at the same time significantly faster. As 3D movie viewing becomes mainstream and the Virtual Reality (VR) market emerges, the demand for 3D contents is growing rapidly. Producing 3D videos, however, remains challenging. In this paper we propose to use deep neural networks to automatically convert 2D videos and images to a stereoscopic 3D format. In contrast to previous automatic 2D-to-3D conversion algorithms, which have separate stages and need ground truth depth map as supervision, our approach is trained end-to-end directly on stereo pairs extracted from existing 3D movies. This novel training scheme makes it possible to exploit orders of magnitude more data and significantly increases performance. Indeed, Deep3D outperforms baselines in both quantitative and human subject evaluations.