EfficientNet-B0 Based Monocular Dense-Depth Map Estimation

Abstract

Monocular depth estimation is a hot research topic in autonomous car driving. Deep convolution neural networks (DCNN) comprising encoder and decoder with transfer learning are exploited in the proposed work for monocular depth map estimation of two-dimensional images. Extracted CNN features from initial stages are later upsampled using a sequence of Bilinear UpSampling and convolution layers to reconstruct the depth map. The encoder forms the feature extraction part, and the decoder forms the image reconstruction part. EfficientNetB0, a new architecture is used with pretrained weights as encoder. It is a revolutionary architecture with smaller model parameters yet achieving higher efficiencies than the architectures of state-of-the-art, pretrained networks. EfficientNet-B0 is compared with two other pretrained networks, the DenseNet-121 and ResNet50 models. Each of these three models are used in encoding stage for features extraction followed by bilinear method of UpSampling in the decoder. The Monocular image is an ill-posed problem and is thus considered as a regression problem. So the metrics used in the proposed work are F1-score, Jaccard score and Mean Actual Error (MAE) etc., between the original and the reconstructed image. The results convey that EfficientNet-B0 outperforms in validation loss, F1-score and Jaccard score compared to DenseNet-121 and ResNet-50 models.