Robust Depth Enhancement via Polarization Prompt Fusion Tuning

Kei Ikemura, Yiming Huang, Felix Heide, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Qifeng Chen, Chenyang Lei; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 20710-20720

Existing depth sensors are imperfect and may provide inaccurate depth values in challenging scenarios such as in the presence of transparent or reflective objects. In this work we present a general framework that leverages polarization imaging to improve inaccurate depth measurements from various depth sensors. Previous polarization-based depth enhancement methods focus on utilizing pure physics-based formulas for a single sensor. In contrast our method first adopts a learning-based strategy where a neural network is trained to estimate a dense and complete depth map from polarization data and a sensor depth map from different sensors. To further improve the performance we propose a Polarization Prompt Fusion Tuning (PPFT) strategy to effectively utilize RGB-based models pre-trained on large-scale datasets as the size of the polarization dataset is limited to train a strong model from scratch. We conducted extensive experiments on a public dataset and the results demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably compared to existing depth enhancement baselines. Code and demos are available at https://lastbasket.github.io/PPFT/.