DevNet: Self-supervised Monocular Depth Learning via Density Volume Construction

TL;DR

DevNet introduces a novel self-supervised monocular depth learning framework that leverages 3D spatial information and density volume construction to improve depth estimation accuracy without increasing model complexity.

Contribution

The paper proposes Density Volume Construction Network (DevNet), which predicts occlusion probability densities on multiple planes to better utilize 3D geometric constraints in depth learning.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods on KITTI-2015 and NYU-V2 datasets.

Reduces root-mean-square deviation by around 4%.

Effectively mitigates photometric ambiguities and overfitting.

Abstract

Self-supervised depth learning from monocular images normally relies on the 2D pixel-wise photometric relation between temporally adjacent image frames. However, they neither fully exploit the 3D point-wise geometric correspondences, nor effectively tackle the ambiguities in the photometric warping caused by occlusions or illumination inconsistency. To address these problems, this work proposes Density Volume Construction Network (DevNet), a novel self-supervised monocular depth learning framework, that can consider 3D spatial information, and exploit stronger geometric constraints among adjacent camera frustums. Instead of directly regressing the pixel value from a single image, our DevNet divides the camera frustum into multiple parallel planes and predicts the pointwise occlusion probability density on each plane. The final depth map is generated by integrating the density along corresponding rays. During the training process, novel regularization strategies and loss functions are introduced to mitigate photometric ambiguities and overfitting. Without obviously enlarging model parameters size or running time, DevNet outperforms several representative baselines on both the KITTI-2015 outdoor dataset and NYU-V2 indoor dataset. In particular, the root-mean-square-deviation is reduced by around 4% with DevNet on both KITTI-2015 and NYU-V2 in the task of depth estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/gitkaichenzhou/DevNet.