Rubén Martínez-Cantín

Javier Rodríguez-Puigvert, David Recasens, Javier Civera et al.

Estimating depth information from endoscopic images is a prerequisite for a wide set of AI-assisted technologies, such as accurate localization and measurement of tumors, or identification of non-inspected areas. As the domain specificity of colonoscopies -- deformable low-texture environments with fluids, poor lighting conditions and abrupt sensor motions -- pose challenges to multi-view 3D reconstructions, single-view depth learning stands out as a promising line of research. Depth learning can be extended in a Bayesian setting, which enables continual learning, improves decision making and can be used to compute confidence intervals or quantify uncertainty for in-body measurements. In this paper, we explore for the first time Bayesian deep networks for single-view depth estimation in colonoscopies. Our specific contribution is two-fold: 1) an exhaustive analysis of scalable Bayesian networks for depth learning in different datasets, highlighting challenges and conclusions regarding synthetic-to-real domain changes and supervised vs. self-supervised methods; and 2) a novel teacher-student approach to deep depth learning that takes into account the teacher uncertainty.

Javier Rodríguez-Puigvert, Rubén Martínez-Cantín, Javier Civera

Uncertainty quantification is essential for robotic perception, as overconfident or point estimators can lead to collisions and damages to the environment and the robot. In this paper, we evaluate scalable approaches to uncertainty quantification in single-view supervised depth learning, specifically MC dropout and deep ensembles. For MC dropout, in particular, we explore the effect of the dropout at different levels in the architecture. We show that adding dropout in all layers of the encoder brings better results than other variations found in the literature. This configuration performs similarly to deep ensembles with a much lower memory footprint, which is relevant forapplications. Finally, we explore the use of depth uncertainty for pseudo-RGBD ICP and demonstrate its potential to estimate accurate two-view relative motion with the real scale.