PAD-Net: Multi-Tasks Guided Prediction-and-Distillation Network for Simultaneous Depth Estimation and Scene Parsing

Dan Xu, Wanli Ouyang, Xiaogang Wang, Nicu Sebe; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 675-684

Depth estimation and scene parsing are two particularly important tasks in visual scene understanding. In this paper we tackle the problem of simultaneous depth estimation and scene parsing in a joint CNN. The task can be typically treated as a deep multi-task learning problem [42]. Different from previous methods directly optimizing multiple tasks given the input training data, this paper proposes a novel multi-task guided prediction-and-distillation network (PAD-Net), which first predicts a set of intermediate auxiliary tasks ranging from low level to high level, and then the predictions from these intermediate auxiliary tasks are utilized as multi-modal input via our proposed multi-modal distillation modules for the final tasks. During the joint learning, the intermediate tasks not only act as supervision for learning more robust deep representations but also pro- vide rich multi-modal information for improving the final tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging datasets (i.e. NYUD-v2 and Cityscapes) for both the depth estimation and scene parsing tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.