SFA-MDEN: Semantic-feature-aided monocular depth estimation network using dual branches

Monocular depth estimation based on unsupervised learning has attracted great attention due to the rising demand for lightweight monocular vision sensors. Inspired by multi-task learning, semantic information has been used to improve the monocular depth estimation models. However, multi-task learning is still limited by multi-type annotations. As far as we know, there are scarcely any large public datasets that provide all the necessary information. Therefore, we propose a novel network architecture Semantic-Feature-Aided Monocular Depth Estimation Network (SFA-MDEN) to extract multi-resolution depth features and semantic features, which are merged and fed into the decoder, with the goal of predicting depth with the support of semantics. Instead of using loss functions to relate the semantics and depth, the fusion of feature maps for semantics and depth is employed to predict the monocular depth. Therefore, two accessible datasets with similar topics for depth estimation and semantic segmentation can meet the requirements of SFA-MDEN for training sets. We explored the performance of the proposed SFA-MDEN with experiments on different datasets, including KITTI, Make3D, and our own dataset BHDE-v1. The experimental results demonstrate that SFA-MDEN achieves competitive accuracy and generalization capacity compared to state-of-the-art methods.