scholarly journals Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation Method Based on Uncertainty Analysis and Retinex Algorithm

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (18) ◽  
pp. 5389
Author(s):  
Chuanxue Song ◽  
Chunyang Qi ◽  
Shixin Song ◽  
Feng Xiao

Depth estimation of a single image presents a classic problem for computer vision, and is important for the 3D reconstruction of scenes, augmented reality, and object detection. At present, most researchers are beginning to focus on unsupervised monocular depth estimation. This paper proposes solutions to the current depth estimation problem. These solutions include a monocular depth estimation method based on uncertainty analysis, which solves the problem in which a neural network has strong expressive ability but cannot evaluate the reliability of an output result. In addition, this paper proposes a photometric loss function based on the Retinex algorithm, which solves the problem of pulling around pixels due to the presence of moving objects. We objectively compare our method to current mainstream monocular depth estimation methods and obtain satisfactory results.

Electronics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 1179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao Huang ◽  
Shuanfeng Zhao ◽  
Longlong Geng ◽  
Qian Xu

To take full advantage of the information of images captured by drones and given that most existing monocular depth estimation methods based on supervised learning require vast quantities of corresponding ground truth depth data for training, the model of unsupervised monocular depth estimation based on residual neural network of coarse–refined feature extractions for drone is therefore proposed. As a virtual camera is introduced through a deep residual convolution neural network based on coarse–refined feature extractions inspired by the principle of binocular depth estimation, the unsupervised monocular depth estimation has become an image reconstruction problem. To improve the performance of our model for monocular depth estimation, the following innovations are proposed. First, the pyramid processing for input image is proposed to build the topological relationship between the resolution of input image and the depth of input image, which can improve the sensitivity of depth information from a single image and reduce the impact of input image resolution on depth estimation. Second, the residual neural network of coarse–refined feature extractions for corresponding image reconstruction is designed to improve the accuracy of feature extraction and solve the contradiction between the calculation time and the numbers of network layers. In addition, to predict high detail output depth maps, the long skip connections between corresponding layers in the neural network of coarse feature extractions and deconvolution neural network of refined feature extractions are designed. Third, the loss of corresponding image reconstruction based on the structural similarity index (SSIM), the loss of approximate disparity smoothness and the loss of depth map are united as a novel training loss to better train our model. The experimental results show that our model has superior performance on the KITTI dataset composed by corresponding left view and right view and Make3D dataset composed by image and corresponding ground truth depth map compared to the state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods and basically meet the requirements for depth information of images captured by drones when our model is trained on KITTI.


Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 690
Author(s):  
Zhimin Zhang ◽  
Jianzhong Qiao ◽  
Shukuan Lin

Supervised monocular depth estimation methods based on learning have shown promising results compared with the traditional methods. However, these methods require a large number of high-quality corresponding ground truth depth data as supervision labels. Due to the limitation of acquisition equipment, it is expensive and impractical to record ground truth depth for different scenes. Compared to supervised methods, the self-supervised monocular depth estimation method without using ground truth depth is a promising research direction, but self-supervised depth estimation from a single image is geometrically ambiguous and suboptimal. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised monocular stereo matching method based on existing approaches to improve the accuracy of depth estimation. This idea is inspired by the experimental results of the paper that the depth estimation accuracy of a stereo pair as input is better than that of a monocular view as input in the same self-supervised network model. Therefore, we decompose the monocular depth estimation problem into two sub-problems, a right view synthesized process followed by a semi-supervised stereo matching process. In order to improve the accuracy of the synthetic right view, we innovate beyond the existing view synthesis method Deep3D by adding a left-right consistency constraint and a smoothness constraint. To reduce the error caused by the reconstructed right view, we propose a semi-supervised stereo matching model that makes use of disparity maps generated by a self-supervised stereo matching model as the supervision cues and joint self-supervised cues to optimize the stereo matching network. In the test, the two networks are able to predict the depth map directly from a single image by pipeline connecting. Both procedures not only obey geometric principles, but also improve estimation accuracy. Test results on the KITTI dataset show that this method is superior to the current mainstream monocular self-supervised depth estimation methods under the same condition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
David Urban ◽  
Alice Caplier

As difficult vision-based tasks like object detection and monocular depth estimation are making their way in real-time applications and as more light weighted solutions for autonomous vehicles navigation systems are emerging, obstacle detection and collision prediction are two very challenging tasks for small embedded devices like drones. We propose a novel light weighted and time-efficient vision-based solution to predict Time-to-Collision from a monocular video camera embedded in a smartglasses device as a module of a navigation system for visually impaired pedestrians. It consists of two modules: a static data extractor made of a convolutional neural network to predict the obstacle position and distance and a dynamic data extractor that stacks the obstacle data from multiple frames and predicts the Time-to-Collision with a simple fully connected neural network. This paper focuses on the Time-to-Collision network’s ability to adapt to new sceneries with different types of obstacles with supervised learning.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Filippo Aleotti ◽  
Giulio Zaccaroni ◽  
Luca Bartolomei ◽  
Matteo Poggi ◽  
Fabio Tosi ◽  
...  

Depth perception is paramount for tackling real-world problems, ranging from autonomous driving to consumer applications. For the latter, depth estimation from a single image would represent the most versatile solution since a standard camera is available on almost any handheld device. Nonetheless, two main issues limit the practical deployment of monocular depth estimation methods on such devices: (i) the low reliability when deployed in the wild and (ii) the resources needed to achieve real-time performance, often not compatible with low-power embedded systems. Therefore, in this paper, we deeply investigate all these issues, showing how they are both addressable by adopting appropriate network design and training strategies. Moreover, we also outline how to map the resulting networks on handheld devices to achieve real-time performance. Our thorough evaluation highlights the ability of such fast networks to generalize well to new environments, a crucial feature required to tackle the extremely varied contexts faced in real applications. Indeed, to further support this evidence, we report experimental results concerning real-time, depth-aware augmented reality and image blurring with smartphones in the wild.


Author(s):  
L. Madhuanand ◽  
F. Nex ◽  
M. Y. Yang

Abstract. Depth is an essential component for various scene understanding tasks and for reconstructing the 3D geometry of the scene. Estimating depth from stereo images requires multiple views of the same scene to be captured which is often not possible when exploring new environments with a UAV. To overcome this monocular depth estimation has been a topic of interest with the recent advancements in computer vision and deep learning techniques. This research has been widely focused on indoor scenes or outdoor scenes captured at ground level. Single image depth estimation from aerial images has been limited due to additional complexities arising from increased camera distance, wider area coverage with lots of occlusions. A new aerial image dataset is prepared specifically for this purpose combining Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) images covering different regions, features and point of views. The single image depth estimation is based on image reconstruction techniques which uses stereo images for learning to estimate depth from single images. Among the various available models for ground-level single image depth estimation, two models, 1) a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and 2) a Generative Adversarial model (GAN) are used to learn depth from aerial images from UAVs. These models generate pixel-wise disparity images which could be converted into depth information. The generated disparity maps from these models are evaluated for its internal quality using various error metrics. The results show higher disparity ranges with smoother images generated by CNN model and sharper images with lesser disparity range generated by GAN model. The produced disparity images are converted to depth information and compared with point clouds obtained using Pix4D. It is found that the CNN model performs better than GAN and produces depth similar to that of Pix4D. This comparison helps in streamlining the efforts to produce depth from a single aerial image.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 2272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faisal Khan ◽  
Saqib Salahuddin ◽  
Hossein Javidnia

Monocular depth estimation from Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images is a well-studied ill-posed problem in computer vision which has been investigated intensively over the past decade using Deep Learning (DL) approaches. The recent approaches for monocular depth estimation mostly rely on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Estimating depth from two-dimensional images plays an important role in various applications including scene reconstruction, 3D object-detection, robotics and autonomous driving. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of this research topic including the problem representation and a short description of traditional methods for depth estimation. Relevant datasets and 13 state-of-the-art deep learning-based approaches for monocular depth estimation are reviewed, evaluated and discussed. We conclude this paper with a perspective towards future research work requiring further investigation in monocular depth estimation challenges.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (06) ◽  
pp. 2050037
Author(s):  
ABHISHEK CHAKRABORTY ◽  
DEBOLEENA SADHUKHAN ◽  
SAURABH PAL ◽  
MADHUCHHANDA MITRA

Recently, photoplethysmography (PPG)-based techniques have been extensively used for cuff-less, automated estimation of blood pressure because of their inexpensive and effortless acquisition technology compared to other conventional approaches. However, most of the reported PPG-based, generalized BP estimation methods often lack the desired accuracy due to pathophysiological diversity. Moreover, some methods rely on several correction factors, which are not globalized yet and require further investigation. In this paper, a simple and automated systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressure estimation method is proposed based on patient-specific neural network (NN) modeling. Initially, 15 time-plane PPG features are extracted and after feature selection, only four selected features are used in the NN model for beat-to-beat estimation of SBP and DBP, respectively. The proposed technique also presents reasonable accuracy while used for generalized estimation of BP. Performance of the algorithm is evaluated on 670 records of 50 intensive care unit (ICU) patients taken from MIMIC, MIMIC II and MIMIC Challenge databases. The proposed algorithm exhibits high average accuracy with (mean[Formula: see text][Formula: see text][Formula: see text]SD) of the estimated SBP as ([Formula: see text]) mmHg and DBP as ([Formula: see text]) mmHg. Compared to the other generalized models, the use of patient-specific approach eliminates the necessity of individual correction factors, thus increasing the robustness, accuracy and potential of the method to be implemented in personal healthcare applications.


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