Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation by Digging into Uncertainty Quantification

Based on well-designed network architectures and objective functions, self-supervised monocular depth estimation has made great progress. However, lacking a specific mechanism to make the network learn more about the regions containing moving objects or occlusion scenarios, existing depth estimation methods likely produce poor results for them. Therefore, we propose an uncertainty quantification method to improve the performance of existing depth estimation networks without changing their architectures. Our uncertainty quantification method consists of uncertainty measurement, the learning guidance by uncertainty, and the ultimate adaptive determination. Firstly, with Snapshot and Siam learning strategies, we measure the uncertainty degree by calculating the variance of pre-converged epochs or twins during training. Secondly, we use the uncertainty to guide the network to strengthen learning about those regions with more uncertainty. Finally, we use the uncertainty to adaptively produce the final depth estimation results with a balance of accuracy and robustness. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our uncertainty quantification method, we apply it to two state-of-the-art models, Monodepth2 and Hints. Experimental results show that our method has improved the depth estimation performance in seven evaluation metrics compared with two baseline models and exceeded the existing uncertainty method.