# Sparse Depth-Guided Attention for Accurate Depth Completion: A Stereo-Assisted Monitored Distillation Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15840 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15840/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Learning of Geometry and Context for Deep Stereo Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04309/) (2017)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)
- [Non-Local Spatial Propagation Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10042/) (2020)
- [PENet: Towards Precise and Efficient Image Guided Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00783/) (2021)
- [DeepLiDAR: Deep Surface Normal Guided Depth Prediction for Outdoor Scene from Sparse LiDAR Data and Single Color Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00488/) (2018)
- [Depth Estimation via Affinity Learned with Convolutional Spatial Propagation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00150/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Techniques for Stereo-based Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02535/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Depth Completion from Visual Inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08616/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Depth Completion with Calibrated Backprojection Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10531/) (2021)
- [Dense Depth Posterior (DDP) from Single Image and Sparse Range](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10034/) (2019)
- [Refine and Distill: Exploiting Cycle-Inconsistency and Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04202/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Adversarial Depth Estimation using Cycled Generative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10915/) (2018)
- [DFuseNet: Deep Fusion of RGB and Sparse Depth Information for Image Guided Dense Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00761/) (2019)
- [Deep Depth Completion from Extremely Sparse Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05335/) (2022)
- [HMS-Net: Hierarchical Multi-scale Sparsity-invariant Network for Sparse Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08685/) (2018)
- [Monitored Distillation for Positive Congruent Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16034/) (2022)
- [Improved Stereo Matching with Constant Highway Networks and Reflective Confidence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00165/) (2016)
- [DenseLiDAR: A Real-Time Pseudo Dense Depth Guided Depth Completion Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12655/) (2021)
- [Boosting Light-Weight Depth Estimation Via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06143/) (2021)
- [Sparse Depth Sensing for Resource-Constrained Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01398/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel method for depth completion, which leverages multi-view improved monitored distillation to generate more precise depth maps. Our approach builds upon the state-of-the-art ensemble distillation method, in which we introduce a stereo-based model as a teacher model to improve the accuracy of the student model for depth completion. By minimizing the reconstruction error of a target image during ensemble distillation, we can avoid learning inherent error modes of completion-based teachers. We introduce an Attention-based Sparse-to-Dense (AS2D) module at the front layer of the student model to enhance its ability to extract global features from sparse depth. To provide self-supervised information, we also employ multi-view depth consistency and multi-scale minimum reprojection. These techniques utilize existing structural constraints to yield supervised signals for student model training, without requiring costly ground truth depth information. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of the baseline monitored distillation method.