FastDepth: Fast monocular depth estimation on embedded systems
Name
1903.03273.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
1.58 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
dd255f354ee574c8af138e6ba1320aa9
Author(s)
Wofk, Diana
Ma, Fangchang
Yang, Tien-Ju
Karaman, Sertac
Sze, Vivienne
Date Issued
May 2019
Journal
2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Publisher
IEEE
Citation
Wofk, Diana et al. “FastDepth: Fast monocular depth estimation on embedded systems.” Paper presented at the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, Canada, May 20-24, 2019, © 2019 The Author(s)
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Depth sensing is a critical function for robotic tasks such as localization, mapping and obstacle detection. There has been a significant and growing interest in depth estimation from a single RGB image, due to the relatively low cost and size of monocular cameras. However, state-of-the-art single-view depth estimation algorithms are based on fairly complex deep neural networks that are too slow for real-time inference on an embedded platform, for instance, mounted on a micro aerial vehicle. In this paper, we address the problem of fast depth estimation on embedded systems. We propose an efficient and lightweight encoder-decoder network architecture and apply network pruning to further reduce computational complexity and latency. In particular, we focus on the design of a low-latency decoder. Our methodology demonstrates that it is possible to achieve similar accuracy as prior work on depth estimation, but at inference speeds that are an order of magnitude faster. Our proposed network, FastDepth, runs at 178 fps on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 GPU and at 27 fps when using only the TX2 CPU, with active power consumption under 10 W. FastDepth achieves close to state-of-the-art accuracy on the NYU Depth v2 dataset. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper demonstrates real-time monocular depth estimation using a deep neural network with the lowest latency and highest throughput on an embedded platform that can be carried by a micro aerial vehicle.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Microsystems Technology Laboratories
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2019.8794182
