Real-time monocular depth estimation with adaptive receptive fields

Monocular depth estimation is a popular research topic in the field of autonomous driving. Nowadays many models are leading in accuracy but performing poorly in a real-time scenario. To effectively increase the depth estimation efficiency, we propose a novel model combining a multi-scale pyramid architecture for depth estimation together with adaptive receptive fields. The pyramid architecture reduces the trainable parameters from dozens of mega to less than 10 mega. Adaptive receptive fields are more sensitive to objects at different depth/distances in images, leading to better accuracy. We have adopted stacked convolution kernels instead of raw kernels to compress the model. Thus, the model that we proposed performs well in both real-time performance and estimation accuracy. We provide a set of experiments where our model performs better in terms of Eigen split than other previously known models. Furthermore, we show that our model is also better in runtime performance in regard to the depth estimation to the rest of models but the Pyd-Net model. Finally, our model is a lightweight depth estimation model with state-of-the-art accuracy.