Self-Supervised Monocular Scene Flow Estimation

Junhwa Hur, Stefan Roth; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 7396-7405

Scene flow estimation has been receiving increasing attention for 3D environment perception. Monocular scene flow estimation - obtaining 3D structure and 3D motion from two temporally consecutive images - is a highly ill-posed problem, and practical solutions are lacking to date. We propose a novel monocular scene flow method that yields competitive accuracy and real-time performance. By taking an inverse problem view, we design a single convolutional neural network (CNN) that successfully estimates depth and 3D motion simultaneously from a classical optical flow cost volume. We adopt self-supervised learning with 3D loss functions and occlusion reasoning to leverage unlabeled data. We validate our design choices, including the proxy loss and augmentation setup. Our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among unsupervised/self-supervised learning approaches to monocular scene flow, and yields competitive results for the optical flow and monocular depth estimation sub-tasks. Semi-supervised fine-tuning further improves the accuracy and yields promising results in real-time.