# A Weakly-Supervised Depth Estimation Network Using Attention Mechanism

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.04819 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04819/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04992/) (2016)
- [DIODE: A Dense Indoor and Outdoor DEpth Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00463/) (2019)
- [DeepStereo: Learning to Predict New Views from the World's Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06825/) (2015)
- [DeepV2D: Video to Depth with Differentiable Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04605/) (2018)
- [Single-Image Depth Perception in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03901/) (2016)
- [High Quality Monocular Depth Estimation via Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11941/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Deep Learning for Monocular Depth Map Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.02706/) (2017)
- [DepthTransfer: Depth Extraction from Video Using Non-parametric Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00987/) (2019)
- [Second-order Non-local Attention Networks for Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00295/) (2019)
- [AdaptiveWeighted Attention Network with Camera Spectral Sensitivity Prior for Spectral Reconstruction from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09305/) (2020)
- [Unified Depth Prediction and Intrinsic Image Decomposition from a Single Image via Joint Convolutional Neural Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06359/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is a fundamental task in many applications such as scene understanding and reconstruction. However, most of the existing methods rely on accurately labeled datasets. A weakly-supervised framework based on attention nested U-net (ANU) named as ANUW is introduced in this paper for cases with wrong labels. The ANUW is trained end-to-end to convert an input single RGB image into a depth image. It consists of a dense residual network structure, an adaptive weight channel attention (AWCA) module, a patch second non-local (PSNL) module and a soft label generation method. The dense residual network is the main body of the network to encode and decode the input. The AWCA module can adaptively adjust the channel weights to extract important features. The PSNL module implements the spatial attention mechanism through a second-order non-local method. The proposed soft label generation method uses the prior knowledge of the dataset to produce soft labels to replace false ones. The proposed ANUW is trained on a defective monocular depth dataset and the trained model is tested on three public datasets, and the results demonstrate the superiority of ANUW in comparison with the state-of-the-art MDE methods.