Learning Monocular Depth Estimation via Selective Distillation of Stereo Knowledge

Abstract: Monocular depth estimation has been extensively explored based on deep learning, yet its accuracy and generalization ability still lag far behind the stereo-based methods. To tackle this, a few recent studies have proposed to supervise the monocular depth estimation network by distilling disparity maps as proxy ground-truths. However, these studies naively distill the stereo knowledge without considering the comparative advantages of stereo-based and monocular depth estimation methods. In this paper, we propose to selectively distill the disparity maps for more reliable proxy supervision. Specifically, we first design a decoder (MaskDecoder) that learns two binary masks which are trained to choose optimally between the proxy disparity maps and the estimated depth maps for each pixel. The learned masks are then fed to another decoder (DepthDecoder) to enforce the estimated depths to learn from only the masked area in the proxy disparity maps. Additionally, a Teacher-Student module is designed to transfer the geometric knowledge of the StereoNet to the MonoNet. Extensive experiments validate our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance for self- and proxy-supervised monocular depth estimation on the KITTI dataset, even surpassing some of the semi-supervised methods.