Monocular weakly supervised depth and pose estimation method based on multi-information fusion

The depth and pose information are the basic issues in the field of robotics, autonomous driving, and virtual reality, and are also the focus and difficult issues of computer vision research. The supervised monocular depth and pose estimation learning are not feasible in environments where labeled data is not abundant. Self-supervised monocular video methods can learn effectively only by applying photometric constraints without expensive ground true depth label constraints, which results in an inefficient training process and suboptimal estimation accuracy. To solve these problems, a monocular weakly supervised depth and pose estimation method based on multi-information fusion is proposed in this paper. First, we design a high-precision stereo vision method to generate a depth and pose data as the "Ground Truth" labels to solve the problem that the ground truth labels are difficult to obtain. Then, we construct a multi-information fusion network model based on the "Ground truth" labels, video sequence, and IMU information to improve the estimation accuracy. Finally, we design the loss function of supervised cues based on "Ground Truth" labels cues and self-supervised cues to optimize our model. In the testing phase, the network model can separately output high-precision depth and pose data from a monocular video sequence. The resulting model outperforms mainstream monocular depth and poses estimation methods as well as the partial stereo matching method in the challenging KITTI dataset by only using a small number of real training data(200 pairs)