MonoPCC: Photometric-invariant cycle constraint for monocular depth estimation of endoscopic images

Photometric constraint is indispensable for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. It involves warping a source image onto a target view using estimated depth&pose, and then minimizing the difference between the warped and target images. However, the endoscopic built-in light causes significant brightness fluctuations, and thus makes the photometric constraint unreliable. Previous efforts only mitigate this relying on extra models to calibrate image brightness. In this paper, we propose MonoPCC to address the brightness inconsistency radically by reshaping the photometric constraint into a cycle form. Instead of only warping the source image, MonoPCC constructs a closed loop consisting of two opposite forward–backward warping paths: from target to source and then back to target. Thus, the target image finally receives an image cycle-warped from itself, which naturally makes the constraint invariant to brightness changes. Moreover, MonoPCC transplants the source image’s phase-frequency into the intermediate warped image to avoid structure lost, and also stabilizes the training via an exponential moving average (EMA) strategy to avoid frequent changes in the forward warping. The comprehensive and extensive experimental results on five datasets demonstrate that our proposed MonoPCC shows a great robustness to the brightness inconsistency, and exceeds other state-of-the-arts by reducing the absolute relative error by 7.27%, 9.38%, 9.90% and 3.17% on four endoscopic datasets, respectively; superior results on the outdoor dataset verify the competitiveness of MonoPCC for the natural scenario. Codes are available at https://github.com/adam99goat/MonoPCC.