Exploiting Pseudo Labels in a Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Improved Monocular Depth Estimation

We present a novel self-distillation based self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SD-SSMDE) learning framework. In the first step, our network is trained in a self-supervised regime on high-resolution images with the photometric loss. The network is further used to generate pseudo depth labels for all the images in the training set. To improve the performance of our estimates, in the second step, we re-train the network with the scale invariant logarithmic loss supervised by pseudo labels. We resolve scale ambiguity and inter-frame scale consistency by introducing an automatically computed scale in our depth labels. To filter out noisy depth values, we devise a filtering scheme based on the 3D consistency between consecutive views. Extensive experiments demonstrate that each proposed component and the self-supervised learning framework improve the quality of the depth estimation over the baseline and achieve state-of-the-art results on the KITTI and Cityscapes datasets.