Depth-Relative Self Attention for Monocular Depth Estimation

Abstract: Monocular depth estimation is very challenging because clues to the exact depth are incomplete in a single RGB image. To overcome the limitation, deep neural networks rely on various visual hints such as size, shade, and texture extracted from RGB information. However, we observe that if such hints are overly exploited, the network can be biased on RGB information without considering the comprehensive view. We propose a novel depth estimation model named RElative Depth Transformer (RED-T) that uses relative depth as guidance in self-attention. Specifically, the model assigns high attention weights to pixels of close depth and low attention weights to pixels of distant depth. As a result, the features of similar depth can become more likely to each other and thus less prone to misused visual hints. We show that the proposed model achieves competitive results in monocular depth estimation benchmarks and is less biased to RGB information. In addition, we propose a novel monocular depth estimation benchmark that limits the observable depth range during training in order to evaluate the robustness of the model for unseen depths.