2020/03/21 by Minghan Zhu, Zhu, Minghan, Maani Ghaffari +11
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Optical measurement and interference techniques #Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.09763
openalex publication_date 2020/03/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper reports a new continuous 3D loss function for learning depth from monocular images. The dense depth prediction from a monocular image is supervised using sparse LIDAR points, which enables us to leverage available open source datasets with camera-LIDAR sensor suites during training. Currently, accurate and affordable range sensor is not readily available. Stereo cameras and LIDARs measure depth either inaccurately or sparsely/costly. In contrast to the current point-to-point loss evaluation approach, the proposed 3D loss treats point clouds as continuous objects; therefore, it compensates for the lack of dense ground truth depth due to LIDAR's sparsity measurements. We applied the proposed loss in three state-of-the-art monocular depth prediction approaches DORN, BTS, and Monodepth2. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed loss improves the depth prediction accuracy and produces point-clouds with more consistent 3D geometric structures compared with all tested baselines, implying the benefit of the proposed loss on general depth prediction networks. A video demo of this work is available at https://youtu.be/5HL8BjSAY4Y.