Depth Estimation From a Single RGB Image Using Fine-Tuned Generative Adversarial Network

Abstract

Estimating the depth map from a single RGB image is important to understand the nature of the terrain in robot navigation and has attracted considerable attention in the past decade. The existing approaches can accurately estimate the depth from a single RGB image, considering a highly structured environment. The problem becomes more challenging when the terrain is highly dynamic. We propose a fine-tuned generative adversarial network to estimate the depth map effectively for a given single RGB image. The proposed network is composed of a fine-tuned generator and a global discriminator. The encoder part of the generator takes input RGB images and depth maps and generates their joint distribution in the latent space. Subsequently, the decoder part of the generator decodes the depth map from the joint distribution. The discriminator takes real and fake pairs in three different configurations and then guides the generator to estimate the depth map from the given RGB image accordingly. Finally, we conducted extensive experiments with a highly dynamic environment dataset for verifying the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach. The proposed approach could decode the depth map from the joint distribution more effectively and accurately than the existing approaches.