36 research outputs found
Depth Prediction Without the Sensors: Leveraging Structure for Unsupervised Learning from Monocular Videos
Learning to predict scene depth from RGB inputs is a challenging task both
for indoor and outdoor robot navigation. In this work we address unsupervised
learning of scene depth and robot ego-motion where supervision is provided by
monocular videos, as cameras are the cheapest, least restrictive and most
ubiquitous sensor for robotics.
Previous work in unsupervised image-to-depth learning has established strong
baselines in the domain. We propose a novel approach which produces higher
quality results, is able to model moving objects and is shown to transfer
across data domains, e.g. from outdoors to indoor scenes. The main idea is to
introduce geometric structure in the learning process, by modeling the scene
and the individual objects; camera ego-motion and object motions are learned
from monocular videos as input. Furthermore an online refinement method is
introduced to adapt learning on the fly to unknown domains.
The proposed approach outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches, including
those that handle motion e.g. through learned flow. Our results are comparable
in quality to the ones which used stereo as supervision and significantly
improve depth prediction on scenes and datasets which contain a lot of object
motion. The approach is of practical relevance, as it allows transfer across
environments, by transferring models trained on data collected for robot
navigation in urban scenes to indoor navigation settings. The code associated
with this paper can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/struct2depth.Comment: Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'19
Joint Prediction of Depths, Normals and Surface Curvature from RGB Images using CNNs
Understanding the 3D structure of a scene is of vital importance, when it
comes to developing fully autonomous robots. To this end, we present a novel
deep learning based framework that estimates depth, surface normals and surface
curvature by only using a single RGB image. To the best of our knowledge this
is the first work to estimate surface curvature from colour using a machine
learning approach. Additionally, we demonstrate that by tuning the network to
infer well designed features, such as surface curvature, we can achieve
improved performance at estimating depth and normals.This indicates that
network guidance is still a useful aspect of designing and training a neural
network. We run extensive experiments where the network is trained to infer
different tasks while the model capacity is kept constant resulting in
different feature maps based on the tasks at hand. We outperform the previous
state-of-the-art benchmarks which jointly estimate depths and surface normals
while predicting surface curvature in parallel
Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations using Videos
Is strong supervision necessary for learning a good visual representation? Do
we really need millions of semantically-labeled images to train a Convolutional
Neural Network (CNN)? In this paper, we present a simple yet surprisingly
powerful approach for unsupervised learning of CNN. Specifically, we use
hundreds of thousands of unlabeled videos from the web to learn visual
representations. Our key idea is that visual tracking provides the supervision.
That is, two patches connected by a track should have similar visual
representation in deep feature space since they probably belong to the same
object or object part. We design a Siamese-triplet network with a ranking loss
function to train this CNN representation. Without using a single image from
ImageNet, just using 100K unlabeled videos and the VOC 2012 dataset, we train
an ensemble of unsupervised networks that achieves 52% mAP (no bounding box
regression). This performance comes tantalizingly close to its
ImageNet-supervised counterpart, an ensemble which achieves a mAP of 54.4%. We
also show that our unsupervised network can perform competitively in other
tasks such as surface-normal estimation