Unsupervised monocular depth estimation techniques have demonstrated encour- aging results but typically assume that the scene is static. These techniques suffer when trained on dynamical scenes, where apparent object motion can equally be ex- plained by hypothesizing the object’s independent motion, or by altering its depth. This ambiguity causes depth estimators to predict erroneous depth for moving objects. To resolve this issue, we introduce Dynamo-Depth, an unifying approach that disambiguates dynamical motion by jointly learning monocular depth, 3D independent flow field, and motion segmentation from unlabeled monocular videos. Specifically, we offer our key insight that a good initial estimation of motion seg- mentation is sufficient for jointly learning depth and independent motion despite the fundamental underlying ambiguity. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on monocular depth estimation on Waymo Open [34] and nuScenes [3] Dataset with significant improvement in the depth of moving objects. Code and additional results are available at https://dynamo-depth.github.io.
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Sparse Representations for Object- and Ego-Motion Estimations in Dynamic Scenes
Disentangling the sources of visual motion in a dynamic scene during self-movement or ego motion is important for autonomous navigation and tracking. In the dynamic image segments of a video frame containing independently moving objects, optic flow relative to the next frame is the sum of the motion fields generated due to camera and object motion. The traditional ego-motion estimation methods assume the scene to be static, and the recent deep learning-based methods do not separate pixel velocities into object- and ego-motion components. We propose a learning-based approach to predict both ego-motion parameters and object-motion field (OMF) from image sequences using a convolutional autoencoder while being robust to variations due to the unconstrained scene depth. This is achieved by: 1) training with continuous ego-motion constraints that allow solving for ego-motion parameters independently of depth and 2) learning a sparsely activated overcomplete ego-motion field (EMF) basis set, which eliminates the irrelevant components in both static and dynamic segments for the task of ego-motion estimation. In order to learn the EMF basis set, we propose a new differentiable sparsity penalty function that approximates the number of nonzero activations in the bottleneck layer of the autoencoder and enforces sparsity more effectively than L1- and L2-norm-based penalties. Unlike the existing direct ego-motion estimation methods, the predicted global EMF can be used to extract OMF directly by comparing it against the optic flow. Compared with the state-of-the-art baselines, the proposed model performs favorably on pixelwise object- and ego-motion estimation tasks when evaluated on real and synthetic data sets of dynamic scenes.
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- PAR ID:
- 10191836
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
- ISSN:
- 2162-237X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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