Versatile depth estimator based on common relative depth estimation and camera-specific relative-to-metric depth conversion

Abstract

A typical monocular depth estimator is trained for a single camera, so its performance drops severely on images taken with different cameras. To address this issue, we propose a versatile depth estimator (VDE), composed of a common relative depth estimator (CRDE) and multiple relative-to-metric converters (R2MCs). The CRDE extracts relative depth information, and each R2MC converts the relative information to predict metric depths for a specific camera. The proposed VDE can cope with diverse scenes, including both indoor and outdoor scenes, with only a 1.12% parameter increase per camera. Experimental results demonstrate that VDE supports multiple cameras effectively and efficiently and also achieves state-of-the-art performance in the conventional single-camera scenario.