Geometric structure based and regularized depth estimation from 360^◦ indoor imagery

Abstract

Motivated by the correlation between the depth and the geometric structure of a 360◦ indoor image, we propose a novel learning-based depth estimation framework that leverages the geometric structure of a scene to conduct depth estimation. Specifically, we represent the geometric structure of an indoor scene as a collection of corners, boundaries and planes. On the one hand, once a depth map is estimated, this geometric structure can be inferred from the estimated depth map; thus, the geometric structure functions as a regularizer for depth estimation. On the other hand, this estimation also benefits from the geometric structure of a scene estimated from an image where the structure functions as a prior. However, furniture in indoor scenes makes it challenging to infer geometric structure from depth or image data. An attention map is inferred to facilitate both depth estimation from features of the geometric structure and also geometric inferences from the estimated depth map. To validate the effectiveness of each component in our framework under controlled conditions, we render a synthetic dataset, Shanghaitech-Kujiale Indoor 360◦ dataset with 3550 360◦ indoor images. Extensive experiments on popular datasets validate the effectiveness of our solution. We also demonstrate that our method can also be applied to counterfactual depth.