Absolute distance prediction based on deep learning object detection and monocular depth estimation models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning framework combining object detection and depth estimation from a single image to accurately predict absolute object distances in outdoor scenes.

Contribution

It presents a novel combination of YOLOv5 for object detection and a self-supervised autoencoder for depth estimation to determine absolute distances from monocular images.

Findings

Achieved 96% accuracy in absolute distance prediction

RMSE of 0.203 in distance estimation

Framework effective on real outdoor images

Abstract

Determining the distance between the objects in a scene and the camera sensor from 2D images is feasible by estimating depth images using stereo cameras or 3D cameras. The outcome of depth estimation is relative distances that can be used to calculate absolute distances to be applicable in reality. However, distance estimation is very challenging using 2D monocular cameras. This paper presents a deep learning framework that consists of two deep networks for depth estimation and object detection using a single image. Firstly, objects in the scene are detected and localized using the You Only Look Once (YOLOv5) network. In parallel, the estimated depth image is computed using a deep autoencoder network to detect the relative distances. The proposed object detection based YOLO was trained using a supervised learning technique, in turn, the network of depth estimation was self-supervised training. The presented distance estimation framework was evaluated on real images of outdoor scenes. The achieved results show that the proposed framework is promising and it yields an accuracy of 96% with RMSE of 0.203 of the correct absolute distance.