RM-Depth: Unsupervised Learning of Recurrent Monocular Depth in Dynamic Scenes

Unsupervised methods have showed promising results on monocular depth estimation. However, the training data must be captured in scenes without moving objects. To push the envelope of accuracy, recent methods tend to increase their model parameters. In this paper, an unsupervised learning framework is proposed to jointly predict monocular depth and complete 3D motion including the motions of moving objects and camera. (1) Recurrent modulation units are used to adaptively and iteratively fuse encoder and decoder features. This not only improves the single-image depth inference but also does not overspend model parameters. (2) Instead of using a single set of filters for upsampling, multiple sets of filters are devised for the residual upsampling. This facilitates the learning of edge-preserving filters and leads to the improved performance. (3) A warping-based network is used to estimate a motion field of moving objects without using semantic priors. This breaks down the requirement of scene rigidity and allows to use general videos for the unsupervised learning. The motion field is further regularized by an outlier-aware training loss. Despite the depth model just uses a single image in test time and 2.97M parameters, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the KITTI and Cityscapes benchmarks.