AdaMM-DepthNet: Unsupervised Adaptive Depth Estimation Guided by Min and Max Depth Priors for Monocular Images

Unsupervised deep learning methods have shown impressive results for the challenging monocular depth estimation task, a field of study that has gained attention in recent years. A common approach for this task is to train a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) via an image synthesis sub-task, where additional views are utilized during training to minimize a photometric reconstruction error. Previous unsupervised depth estimation networks are trained within a fixed depth estimation range, irrespective of its possible range for a given image, leading to suboptimal estimates. To overcome this suboptimal limitation, we first propose an unsupervised adaptive depth estimation method guided by minimum and maximum (min-max) depth priors for a given input image. The incorporation of min-max depth priors can drastically reduce the depth estimation complexity and produce depth estimates with higher accuracy. Moreover, we propose a novel network architecture for adaptive depth estimation, called the AdaMM-DepthNet, which adopts the min-max depth estimation in its front side. Intensive experimental results demonstrate that the adaptive depth estimation can significantly boost up the accuracy with a fewer number of parameters over the conventional approaches with a fixed minimum and maximum depth range.