360° High-Resolution Depth Estimation via Uncertainty-Aware Structural Knowledge Transfer

To predict high-resolution (HR) omnidirectional depth maps, existing methods typically leverage HR omnidirectional image (ODI) as the input via fully supervised learning. However, in practice, taking HR ODI as input is undesired due to resource-constrained devices. In addition, depth maps are often with lower resolution than color images. Therefore, in this article, we explore for the first time to estimate the HR omnidirectional depth directly from a low-resolution (LR) ODI, when no HR depth ground truth (GT) map is available. Our key idea is to transfer the scene structural knowledge from the HR image modality and the corresponding LR depth maps to achieve the goal of HR depth estimation without any extra inference cost. Specifically, we introduce ODI super-resolution (SR) as an auxiliary task and train both tasks collaboratively in a weakly supervised manner to boost the performance of HR depth estimation. The ODI SR task extracts the scene structural knowledge via uncertainty estimation. Buttressed by this, a scene structural knowledge transfer (SSKT) module is proposed with two key components. First, we employ a cylindrical implicit interpolation function (CIIF) to learn cylindrical neural interpolation weights for feature up-sampling and share the parameters of CIIFs between the two tasks. Then, we propose a feature distillation (FD) loss that provides extra structural regularization to help the HR depth estimation task learn more scene structural knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our weakly supervised method outperforms baseline methods, and even achieves comparable performance with the fully supervised methods.