Monocular Depth Estimation: Lightweight Convolutional and Matrix Capsule Feature-Fusion Network

Abstract

This paper reports a study that aims to solve the problem of the weak adaptability to angle transformation of current monocular depth estimation algorithms. These algorithms are based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but produce results lacking in estimation accuracy and robustness. The paper proposes a lightweight network based on convolution and capsule feature fusion (CNNapsule). First, the paper introduces a fusion block module that integrates CNN features and matrix capsule features to improve the adaptability of the network to perspective transformations. The fusion and deconvolution features are fused through skip connections to generate a depth image. In addition, the corresponding loss function is designed according to the long-tail distribution, gradient similarity, and structural similarity of the datasets. Finally, the results are compared with the methods applied to the NYU Depth V2 and KITTI datasets and show that our proposed method has better accuracy on the C1 and C2 indices and a better visual effect than traditional methods and deep learning methods without transfer learning. The number of trainable parameters required by this method is 65% lower than that required by methods presented in the literature. The generalization of this method is verified via the comparative testing of the data collected from the internet and mobile phones.