Monocular Depth Estimation via Self-Supervised Self-Distillation

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation can exhibit excellent performance in static environments due to the multi-view consistency assumption during the training process. However, it is hard to maintain depth consistency in dynamic scenes when considering the occlusion problem caused by moving objects. For this reason, we propose a method of self-supervised self-distillation for monocular depth estimation (SS-MDE) in dynamic scenes, where a deep network with a multi-scale decoder and a lightweight pose network are designed to predict depth in a self-supervised manner via the disparity, motion information, and the association between two adjacent frames in the image sequence. Meanwhile, in order to improve the depth estimation accuracy of static areas, the pseudo-depth images generated by the LeReS network are used to provide the pseudo-supervision information, enhancing the effect of depth refinement in static areas. Furthermore, a forgetting factor is leveraged to alleviate the dependency on the pseudo-supervision. In addition, a teacher model is introduced to generate depth prior information, and a multi-view mask filter module is designed to implement feature extraction and noise filtering. This can enable the student model to better learn the deep structure of dynamic scenes, enhancing the generalization and robustness of the entire model in a self-distillation manner. Finally, on four public data datasets, the performance of the proposed SS-MDE method outperformed several state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation techniques, achieving an accuracy (δ1) of 89% while minimizing the error (AbsRel) by 0.102 in NYU-Depth V2 and achieving an accuracy (δ1) of 87% while minimizing the error (AbsRel) by 0.111 in KITTI.