LED: Light Enhanced Depth Estimation at Night

Abstract: Nighttime camera-based depth estimation is a highly challenging task, especially for autonomous driving applications, where accurate depth perception is essential for ensuring safe navigation. We aim to improve the reliability of perception systems at night time, where models trained on daytime data often fail in the absence of precise but costly LiDAR sensors. In this work, we introduce Light Enhanced Depth (LED), a novel cost-effective approach that significantly improves depth estimation in low-light environments by harnessing a pattern projected by high definition headlights available in modern vehicles. LED leads to significant performance boosts across multiple depth-estimation architectures (encoder-decoder, Adabins, DepthFormer) both on synthetic and real datasets. Furthermore, increased performances beyond illuminated areas reveal a holistic enhancement in scene understanding. Finally, we release the Nighttime Synthetic Drive Dataset, a new synthetic and photo-realistic nighttime dataset, which comprises 49,990 comprehensively annotated images.