Unsupervised depth estimation for ship target based on single view UAV image

Abstract

ABSTRACT The goal of depth estimation is to obtain the depth image which reflects the distance between the object and the camera point. Depth image can provide depth information for tasks, such as three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction and distance perception. With the development of the environment perception research of the unmanned ship and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), depth estimation has been widely used in the field of water transportation. However, the research of ship depth estimation based on monocular images has just started, and there is no unsupervised deep learning depth estimation method for ship target based on single view UAV image. This paper proposes an unsupervised deep learning ship depth estimation method based on single view UAV images. Firstly, the realistic rendering software is used to construct a new ship training dataset with simple backgrounds and regular lighting conditions. Secondly, based on the differentiable rendering framework, a knowledge distillation depth estimation network is designed to train a student network with much smaller number of model parameters. Finally, the ship depth estimation network is obtained through unsupervised training. The experiment results show that the designed knowledge distillation depth estimation network can generate better depth estimation results compared with the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, and the weight file size of our model is smaller.