A Unified Framework for Depth Prediction from a Single Image and Binocular Stereo Matching

Depth information has long been an important issue in computer vision. The methods for this can be categorized into (1) depth prediction from a single image and (2) binocular stereo matching. However, these two methods are generally regarded as separate tasks, which are accomplished in different network architectures when using deep learning-based methods. This study argues that these two tasks can be achieved using only one network with the same weights. We modify existing networks for stereo matching to perform the two tasks. We first enable the network capable of accepting both a single image and an image pair by duplicating the left image when the right image is absent. Then, we introduce a training procedure that alternatively selects training samples of depth prediction from a single image and binocular stereo matching. In this manner, the trained network can perform both tasks and single-image depth prediction even benefits from stereo matching to achieve better performance. Experimental results on KITTI raw dataset show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances for accomplishing depth prediction from a single image and binocular stereo matching in the same architecture