Hybrid Transformer Based Feature Fusion for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

With an unprecedented increase in the number of agents and systems that aim to navigate the real world using visual cues and the rising impetus for 3D Vision Models, the importance of depth estimation is hard to understate. While supervised methods remain the gold standard in the domain, the copious amount of paired stereo data required to train such models makes them impractical. Most State of the Art (SOTA) works in the self-supervised and unsupervised domain employ a ResNet-based encoder architecture to predict disparity maps from a given input image which are eventually used alongside a camera pose estimator to predict depth without direct supervision. The fully convolutional nature of ResNets makes them susceptible to capturing per-pixel local information only, which is suboptimal for depth prediction. Our key insight for doing away with this bottleneck is to use Vision Transformers, which employ self-attention to capture the global contextual information present in an input image. Our model fuses per-pixel local information learned using two fully convolutional depth encoders with global contextual information learned by a transformer encoder at different scales. It does so using a mask-guided multi-stream convolution in the feature space to achieve state-of-the-art performance on most standard benchmarks.Comment: Presented at the Advances in Image Manipulation Workshop at ECCV 202

Preliminary report on a reconnaissance survey of the major coastal and marine ecosystems in Gulf of Kutch

The region of Gulf of Kutch was possibly more an arid zone in the pleistocene, almost approaching to a desert condition, than what it is at present. The Gulf of Kutch covers an area of circa 7,350 sq. km with a maximum depth of 60 m. The tidal range varies from 3.06 to 5.89 m with an average of 4 m. The intertidal zones are sandy and muddy or with sandstones of vast expanse and prolonged exposure. The present report is based on a six weeks survey carried out in the Gulf of Kutch mainly around Okha and Jamnagar in 1978 with a view to obtaining additional information on the major marine and coastal habitats, particularly the coral formations and the mangroves. The prevailing physical features,animal communities and the visible ecological impact on the ecosystems due to human interference are briefly discussed. The most important physical factor that at present aifect the marine life of Gulf of Kutch seems to be the high degree of sedimentation. Existence of extreme physical conditions such as prolonged exposure due to very high tidal amplitude is a major factor that applies constraints on the colonization of many marine animals. The higher rate of sedimentation in the inshore waters of Gulf of Kutch appears to be the most deleterious physical factor that affect the marine fauna at present