Foreground-aware Dense Depth Estimation for 360 Images

Feng, Qi, Shum, Hubert, Shimamura, Ryo and Morishima, Shigeo (2020) Foreground-aware Dense Depth Estimation for 360 Images. Journal of WSCG, 28 (1-2). pp. 79-88. ISSN 1213-6972

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Abstract

With 360 imaging devices becoming widely accessible, omnidirectional content has gained popularity in multiple
fields. The ability to estimate depth from a single omnidirectional image can benefit applications such as robotics
navigation and virtual reality. However, existing depth estimation approaches produce sub-optimal results on
real-world omnidirectional images with dynamic foreground objects. On the one hand, capture-based methods
cannot obtain the foreground due to the limitations of the scanning and stitching schemes. On the other hand, it is
challenging for synthesis-based methods to generate highly-realistic virtual foreground objects that are comparable
to the real-world ones. In this paper, we propose to augment datasets with realistic foreground objects using an
image-based approach, which produces a foreground-aware photorealistic dataset for machine learning algorithms.
By exploiting a novel scale-invariant RGB-D correspondence in the spherical domain, we repurpose abundant
non-omnidirectional datasets to include realistic foreground objects with correct distortions. We further propose a
novel auxiliary deep neural network to estimate both the depth of the omnidirectional images and the mask of the
foreground objects, where the two tasks facilitate each other. A new local depth loss considers small regions of
interests and ensures that their depth estimations are not smoothed out during the global gradient’s optimization.
We demonstrate the system using human as the foreground due to its complexity and contextual importance,
while the framework can be generalized to any other foreground objects. Experimental results demonstrate more
consistent global estimations and more accurate local estimations compared with state-of-the-arts.

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