Semi-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency Using Deep Neural Network

There has been tremendous research progress in estimating the depth of a scene from a monocular camera image. Existing methods for single-image depth prediction are exclusively based on deep neural networks, and their training can be unsupervised using stereo image pairs, supervised using LiDAR point clouds, or semi-supervised using both stereo and LiDAR. In general, semi-supervised training is preferred as it does not suffer from the weaknesses of either supervised training, resulting from the difference in the cameras and the LiDARs field of view, or unsupervised training, resulting from the poor depth accuracy that can be recovered from a stereo pair. In this paper, we present our research in single image depth prediction using semi-supervised training that outperforms the state-of-the-art. We achieve this through a loss function that explicitly exploits left-right consistency in a stereo reconstruction, which has not been adopted in previous semi-supervised training. In addition, we describe the correct use of ground truth depth derived from LiDAR that can significantly reduce prediction error. The performance of our depth prediction model is evaluated on popular datasets, and the importance of each aspect of our semi-supervised training approach is demonstrated through experimental results. Our deep neural network model has been made publicly available.