Regularizing Nighttime Weirdness: Efficient Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in the Dark

Kun Wang, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhiqiang Yan, Xiang Li, Baobei Xu, Jun Li, Jian Yang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 16055-16064

Monocular depth estimation aims at predicting depth from a single image or video. Recently, self-supervised methods draw much attention since they are free of depth annotations and achieve impressive performance on several daytime benchmarks. However, they produce weird outputs in more challenging nighttime scenarios because of low visibility and varying illuminations, which bring weak textures and break brightness-consistency assumption, respectively. To address these problems, in this paper we propose a novel framework with several improvements: (1) we introduce Priors-Based Regularization to learn distribution knowledge from unpaired depth maps and prevent model from being incorrectly trained; (2) we leverage Mapping-Consistent Image Enhancement module to enhance image visibility and contrast while maintaining brightness consistency; and (3) we present Statistics-Based Mask strategy to tune the number of removed pixels within textureless regions, using dynamic statistics. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. Meanwhile, our framework achieves remarkable improvements and state-of-the-art results on two nighttime datasets.