FG-Depth: Flow-Guided Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation
This work improves depth estimation accuracy for applications like robotics and autonomous driving, though it is incremental by building on prior unsupervised methods.
The paper tackles the problem of unsupervised monocular depth estimation by addressing local minima in optimization, using a flow-guided framework to achieve state-of-the-art results on KITTI and NYU-Depth-v2 datasets.
The great potential of unsupervised monocular depth estimation has been demonstrated by many works due to low annotation cost and impressive accuracy comparable to supervised methods. To further improve the performance, recent works mainly focus on designing more complex network structures and exploiting extra supervised information, e.g., semantic segmentation. These methods optimize the models by exploiting the reconstructed relationship between the target and reference images in varying degrees. However, previous methods prove that this image reconstruction optimization is prone to get trapped in local minima. In this paper, our core idea is to guide the optimization with prior knowledge from pretrained Flow-Net. And we show that the bottleneck of unsupervised monocular depth estimation can be broken with our simple but effective framework named FG-Depth. In particular, we propose (i) a flow distillation loss to replace the typical photometric loss that limits the capacity of the model and (ii) a prior flow based mask to remove invalid pixels that bring the noise in training loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of each component, and our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on both KITTI and NYU-Depth-v2 datasets.