Cascade Network for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cascade network-based self-supervised method for monocular depth estimation, dividing scenes into parts to improve accuracy and reliability, achieving state-of-the-art results on the KITTI benchmark.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cascade network approach that segments scenes by depth and trains separate models for each segment, enhancing depth estimation performance.

Findings

Improved accuracy over previous self-supervised methods

Achieved state-of-the-art results on KITTI benchmark

Demonstrated effectiveness of scene segmentation in depth estimation

Abstract

It is a classical compute vision problem to obtain real scene depth maps by using a monocular camera, which has been widely concerned in recent years. However, training this model usually requires a large number of artificially labeled samples. To solve this problem, some researchers use a self-supervised learning model to overcome this problem and reduce the dependence on manually labeled data. Nevertheless, the accuracy and reliability of these methods have not reached the expected standard. In this paper, we propose a new self-supervised learning method based on cascade networks. Compared with the previous self-supervised methods, our method has improved accuracy and reliability, and we have proved this by experiments. We show a cascaded neural network that divides the target scene into parts of different sight distances and trains them separately to generate a better depth map. Our approach is divided into the following four steps. In the first step, we use the self-supervised model to estimate the depth of the scene roughly. In the second step, the depth of the scene generated in the first step is used as a label to divide the scene into different depth parts. The third step is to use models with different parameters to generate depth maps of different depth parts in the target scene, and the fourth step is to fuse the depth map. Through the ablation study, we demonstrated the effectiveness of each component individually and showed high-quality, state-of-the-art results in the KITTI benchmark.