Monocular depth map estimation based on a multi-scale deep architecture and curvilinear saliency feature boosting

Estimating depth from a monocular camera is a must for many applications, including scene understanding and reconstruction, robot vision, and self-driving cars. However, generating depth maps from single RGB images is still a challenge as object shapes are to be inferred from intensity images strongly affected by viewpoint changes, texture content and light conditions. Therefore, most current solutions produce blurry approximations of low-resolution depth maps. We propose a novel depth map estimation technique based on an autoencoder network. This network is endowed with a multi-scale architecture and a multi-level depth estimator that preserve high-level information extracted from coarse feature maps as well as detailed local information present in fine feature maps. Curvilinear saliency, which is related to curvature estimation, is exploited as a loss function to boost the depth accuracy at object boundaries and raise the performance of the estimated high-resolution depth maps. We evaluate our model on the public NYU Depth v2 and Make3D datasets. The proposed model yields superior performance on both datasets compared to the state-of-the-art, achieving an accuracy of \(~86\%\) and showing exceptional performance at the preservation of object boundaries and small 3D structures. The code of the proposed model is publicly available at https://​github.​com/​SaddamAbdulrhman​/​MDACSFB.