BRNet: Exploring Comprehensive Features for Monocular Depth Estimation

Wencheng Han, Junbo Yin, Xiaogang Jin, Xiangdong Dai, Jianbing Shen ;

"Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has achieved promising performance recently. A consensus is that high-resolution inputs often yield better results. However, we find that the performance gap between high and low resolutions lies in the inappropriate feature representation of the widely used U-Net backbone. In this paper, we address the comprehensive feature representation problem for self-supervised depth estimation.i.e paying attention to both local and global feature representation. Specifically, we first provide an in-depth analysis of the influence of different input resolutions and find out that the receptive fields play a more crucial role than the information disparity between inputs. To this end, we propose a bilateral depth encoder that can fully exploit detailed and global information. It benefits from more broad receptive fields and thus achieves substantial improvements. Furthermore, we propose a residual decoder to facilitate depth regression as well as save computations by focusing on the information difference between different layers. We named our new depth estimation model Bilateral Residual Depth Network (BRNet). Experimental results show that BRNet achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark with three types of self-supervision."