EC-Depth: Exploring the consistency of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in challenging scenes
This addresses robustness issues in depth estimation for autonomous driving and robotics, but is incremental as it builds on existing self-supervised methods.
The paper tackles the problem of self-supervised monocular depth estimation failing in adverse conditions like rain, and presents EC-Depth, a two-stage framework that achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as KITTI and NuScenes-Night.
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation holds significant importance in the fields of autonomous driving and robotics. However, existing methods are typically trained and tested on standard datasets, overlooking the impact of various adverse conditions prevalent in real-world applications, such as rainy days. As a result, it is commonly observed that these methods struggle to handle these challenging scenarios. To address this issue, we present EC-Depth, a novel self-supervised two-stage framework to achieve a robust depth estimation. In the first stage, we propose depth consistency regularization to propagate reliable supervision from standard to challenging scenes. In the second stage, we adopt the Mean Teacher paradigm and propose a novel consistency-based pseudo-label filtering strategy to improve the quality of pseudo-labels, further improving both the accuracy and robustness of our model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves accurate and consistent depth predictions in both standard and challenging scenarios, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods on KITTI, KITTI-C, DrivingStereo, and NuScenes-Night benchmarks.