Do More With What You Have: Transferring Depth-Scale from Labeled to Unlabeled Domains

Abstract

Transferring the absolute depth prediction capabilities of an estimator to a new domain is a task with significant real-world applications. This task is specifically challenging when images from the new domain are collected without ground-truth depth measurements, and possibly with sensors of different intrinsics. To overcome such limitations, a recent zero-shot solution was trained on an extensive training dataset and encoded the various camera intrinsics. Other solutions generated synthetic data with depth labels that matched the intrinsics of the new target data to enable depth-scale transfer between the domains. In this work we present an alternative solution that can utilize any existing synthetic or real dataset, that has a small number of images annotated with ground truth depth labels. Specifically, we show that self-supervised depth estimators result in up-to-scale predictions that are linearly correlated to their absolute depth values across the domain, a property that we model in this work using a single scalar. In addition, aligning the field-of-view of two datasets prior to training, results in a common linear relationship for both domains. We use this observed property to transfer the depth-scale from source datasets that have absolute depth labels to new target datasets that lack these measurements, enabling absolute depth predictions in the target domain. The suggested method was successfully demonstrated on the KITTI, DDAD and nuScenes datasets, while using other existing real or synthetic source datasets, that have a different field-of-view, other image style or structural content, achieving comparable or better accuracy than other existing methods that do not use target ground-truth depths.