No Arabic abstract
Unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion from unlabelled monocular videos has recently drawn great attention, which avoids the use of expensive ground truth in the supervised one. It achieves this by using the photometric errors between the target view and the synthesized views from its adjacent source views as the loss. Despite significant progress, the learning still suffers from occlusion and scene dynamics. This paper shows that carefully manipulating photometric errors can tackle these difficulties better. The primary improvement is achieved by a statistical technique that can mask out the invisible or nonstationary pixels in the photometric error map and thus prevents misleading the networks. With this outlier masking approach, the depth of objects moving in the opposite direction to the camera can be estimated more accurately. To the best of our knowledge, such scenarios have not been seriously considered in the previous works, even though they pose a higher risk in applications like autonomous driving. We also propose an efficient weighted multi-scale scheme to reduce the artifacts in the predicted depth maps. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. The overall system achieves state-of-theart performance on both depth and ego-motion estimation.
A new unsupervised learning method of depth and ego-motion using multiple masks from monocular video is proposed in this paper. The depth estimation network and the ego-motion estimation network are trained according to the constraints of depth and ego-motion without truth values. The main contribution of our method is to carefully consider the occlusion of the pixels generated when the adjacent frames are projected to each other, and the blank problem generated in the projection target imaging plane. Two fine masks are designed to solve most of the image pixel mismatch caused by the movement of the camera. In addition, some relatively rare circumstances are considered, and repeated masking is proposed. To some extent, the method is to use a geometric relationship to filter the mismatched pixels for training, making unsupervised learning more efficient and accurate. The experiments on KITTI dataset show our method achieves good performance in terms of depth and ego-motion. The generalization capability of our method is demonstrated by training on the low-quality uncalibrated bike video dataset and evaluating on KITTI dataset, and the results are still good.
Recent work has shown that CNN-based depth and ego-motion estimators can be learned using unlabelled monocular videos. However, the performance is limited by unidentified moving objects that violate the underlying static scene assumption in geometric image reconstruction. More significantly, due to lack of proper constraints, networks output scale-inconsistent results over different samples, i.e., the ego-motion network cannot provide full camera trajectories over a long video sequence because of the per-frame scale ambiguity. This paper tackles these challenges by proposing a geometry consistency loss for scale-consistent predictions and an induced self-discovered mask for handling moving objects and occlusions. Since we do not leverage multi-task learning like recent works, our framework is much simpler and more efficient. Comprehensive evaluation results demonstrate that our depth estimator achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI dataset. Moreover, we show that our ego-motion network is able to predict a globally scale-consistent camera trajectory for long video sequences, and the resulting visual odometry accuracy is competitive with the recent model that is trained using stereo videos. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to show that deep networks trained using unlabelled monocular videos can predict globally scale-consistent camera trajectories over a long video sequence.
We propose a semantics-driven unsupervised learning approach for monocular depth and ego-motion estimation from videos in this paper. Recent unsupervised learning methods employ photometric errors between synthetic view and actual image as a supervision signal for training. In our method, we exploit semantic segmentation information to mitigate the effects of dynamic objects and occlusions in the scene, and to improve depth prediction performance by considering the correlation between depth and semantics. To avoid costly labeling process, we use noisy semantic segmentation results obtained by a pre-trained semantic segmentation network. In addition, we minimize the position error between the corresponding points of adjacent frames to utilize 3D spatial information. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that our method achieves good performance in both depth and ego-motion estimation tasks.
Most of the deep-learning based depth and ego-motion networks have been designed for visible cameras. However, visible cameras heavily rely on the presence of an external light source. Therefore, it is challenging to use them under low-light conditions such as night scenes, tunnels, and other harsh conditions. A thermal camera is one solution to compensate for this problem because it detects Long Wave Infrared Radiation(LWIR) regardless of any external light sources. However, despite this advantage, both depth and ego-motion estimation research for the thermal camera are not actively explored until so far. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning method for the all-day depth and ego-motion estimation. The proposed method exploits multi-spectral consistency loss to gives complementary supervision for the networks by reconstructing visible and thermal images with the depth and pose estimated from thermal images. The networks trained with the proposed method robustly estimate the depth and pose from monocular thermal video under low-light and even zero-light conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to simultaneously estimate both depth and ego-motion from the monocular thermal video in an unsupervised manner.
For ego-motion estimation, the feature representation of the scenes is crucial. Previous methods indicate that both the low-level and semantic feature-based methods can achieve promising results. Therefore, the incorporation of hierarchical feature representation may benefit from both methods. From this perspective, we propose a novel direct feature odometry framework, named DFO, for depth estimation and hierarchical feature representation learning from monocular videos. By exploiting the metric distance, our framework is able to learn the hierarchical feature representation without supervision. The pose is obtained with a coarse-to-fine approach from high-level to low-level features in enlarged feature maps. The pixel-level attention mask can be self-learned to provide the prior information. In contrast to the previous methods, our proposed method calculates the camera motion with a direct method rather than regressing the ego-motion from the pose network. With this approach, the consistency of the scale factor of translation can be constrained. Additionally, the proposed method is thus compatible with the traditional SLAM pipeline. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.