Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning in Dynamic Scenes

Hanhan Li
Ariel Gordon
Hang Zhao
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) (2020)

Abstract

We present a method for jointly training the estimation of depth, ego-motion, and a dense 3D translation field of objects relative to the scene, with monocular photometric consistency being the sole source of supervision. We show that this apparently heavily-underdetermined problem can be regularized by imposing the following prior knowledge about 3D translation fields: they are sparse, since most of the scene is static, and they tend to be constant for rigid moving objects. We show that this regularization alone is sufficient to train monocular depth prediction models that exceed the accuracy achieved in prior work for dynamic scenes, including semantically-aware methods. The code is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/depth_and_motion_learning.