# Real-Time Monocular Human Depth Estimation and Segmentation on Embedded Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.10506 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10506/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05830/) (2016)
- [NetAdapt: Platform-Aware Neural Network Adaptation for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03230/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Single Image Depth Estimation: Toward Higher Resolution Maps with Accurate Object Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08673/) (2018)
- [ESPNet: Efficient Spatial Pyramid of Dilated Convolutions for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06815/) (2018)
- [DFANet: Deep Feature Aggregation for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02216/) (2019)
- [FastDepth: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation on Embedded Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03273/) (2019)
- [ESPNetv2: A Light-weight, Power Efficient, and General Purpose Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11431/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Joint Semantic Segmentation and Depth Estimation Using Asymmetric Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04766/) (2018)
- [LEDNet: A Lightweight Encoder-Decoder Network for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02423/) (2019)
- [Normal Assisted Stereo Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10444/) (2019)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09402/) (2019)
- [Towards real-time unsupervised monocular depth estimation on CPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11430/) (2018)
- [GANVO: Unsupervised Deep Monocular Visual Odometry and Depth Estimation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05786/) (2018)
- [LiteSeg: A Novel Lightweight ConvNet for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06683/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Deep Learning on Home Drone: Searching for the Optimal Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11064/) (2022)
- [An Embedded Monocular Vision Approach for Ground-Aware Objects Detection and Position Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09851/) (2022)
- [NeoARCADE: Robust Calibration for Distance Estimation to Support Assistive Drones for the Visually Impaired](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01988/) (2025)
- [Domain-Transferred Synthetic Data Generation for Improving Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01113/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating a scene's depth to achieve collision avoidance against moving pedestrians is a crucial and fundamental problem in the robotic field. This paper proposes a novel, low complexity network architecture for fast and accurate human depth estimation and segmentation in indoor environments, aiming to applications for resource-constrained platforms (including battery-powered aerial, micro-aerial, and ground vehicles) with a monocular camera being the primary perception module. Following the encoder-decoder structure, the proposed framework consists of two branches, one for depth prediction and another for semantic segmentation. Moreover, network structure optimization is employed to improve its forward inference speed. Exhaustive experiments on three self-generated datasets prove our pipeline's capability to execute in real-time, achieving higher frame rates than contemporary state-of-the-art frameworks (114.6 frames per second on an NVIDIA Jetson Nano GPU with TensorRT) while maintaining comparable accuracy.