Leveraging Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Robust Monocular Depth Estimation

Temel Kavramlar

Marigold, a diffusion model-based method, can effectively leverage the rich visual priors captured in modern generative image models to achieve state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot monocular depth estimation across diverse real-world scenes.

Özet

The paper presents Marigold, a method for affine-invariant monocular depth estimation that is derived from the Stable Diffusion text-to-image diffusion model. The key idea is to leverage the extensive visual priors captured in recent generative diffusion models to enable better and more generalizable depth estimation.
The authors first formulate monocular depth estimation as a conditional denoising diffusion generation task, where the goal is to model the conditional distribution of depth given an input image. They then introduce a fine-tuning protocol to adapt the pre-trained Stable Diffusion model for this task, by modifying and fine-tuning only the denoising U-Net component while keeping the latent space and VAE encoder-decoder intact.
The proposed method, Marigold, is trained exclusively on synthetic depth datasets, which provide clean and dense ground truth depth maps. Despite this, the model exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization to a wide range of real-world datasets, outperforming several state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods. The authors attribute this to the rich visual priors captured in the pre-trained diffusion model.
The paper also presents several ablation studies, investigating the impact of training noise, dataset domain, test-time ensembling, and the number of denoising steps. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fine-tuning approach and the importance of the underlying diffusion-based visual priors.

İstatistikler

The depth maps in the training datasets (Hypersim and Virtual KITTI) are normalized to the range [-1, 1] using an affine transformation based on the 2% and 98% depth percentiles.
The Hypersim dataset contains 54K training samples from 365 indoor scenes, while the Virtual KITTI dataset contains 20K training samples from 4 outdoor street scenes.

Alıntılar

"Marigold, a diffusion model and associated fine-tuning protocol for monocular depth estimation. Its core principle is to leverage the rich visual knowledge stored in modern generative image models."
"Despite being trained solely on synthetic depth datasets, the model can well generalize to a wide range of real scenes. This successful adaptation of diffusion-based image generation models toward depth estimation confirms our initial hypothesis that a comprehensive representation of the visual world is the cornerstone of monocular depth estimation."

Önemli Bilgiler Şuradan Elde Edildi

Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation

by Bingxin Ke,A... : arxiv.org 04-04-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.02145.pdf

Daha Derin Sorular

How can the proposed fine-tuning protocol be extended to other vision tasks beyond depth estimation, such as object detection or semantic segmentation

The proposed fine-tuning protocol for Marigold can be extended to other vision tasks beyond depth estimation by adapting the model architecture and training process accordingly. For tasks like object detection or semantic segmentation, the pretrained image generator can be fine-tuned with synthetic data specific to those tasks. The key steps to extend the protocol would include:

Task-specific Data Preparation: Curate synthetic datasets that are tailored to the new vision task, such as object detection or semantic segmentation. These datasets should include annotated images and corresponding ground truth labels.
Model Architecture Modification: Adjust the architecture of the pretrained image generator to align with the requirements of the new task. For object detection, this may involve incorporating region proposal networks or anchor boxes. For semantic segmentation, the model may need to output pixel-wise class labels.
Loss Function Design: Define task-specific loss functions that are suitable for the new vision task. For object detection, this could involve a combination of classification and localization losses. For semantic segmentation, pixel-wise cross-entropy loss may be used.
Fine-Tuning Process: Implement a fine-tuning protocol similar to Marigold, where the pretrained model is adapted to the new task using the synthetic data. This process may involve adjusting hyperparameters, data augmentation techniques, and optimization strategies.

What are the potential limitations of relying solely on synthetic data for training, and how could real-world data be incorporated to further improve the generalization capabilities of the model

Relying solely on synthetic data for training may have limitations in terms of generalization to real-world scenarios. Some potential limitations include:

Domain Gap: Synthetic data may not fully capture the variability and complexity of real-world scenes, leading to a domain gap. This can result in the model performing poorly on real data that differs significantly from the synthetic training data.
Limited Realism: Synthetic data may lack the subtle nuances and imperfections present in real-world images, affecting the model's ability to generalize to diverse and challenging scenarios.
Sensor Noise and Artifacts: Real-world data often contains sensor noise, occlusions, and other artifacts that are not present in synthetic data. Without exposure to such real-world challenges, the model may struggle to perform well in practical applications.
To address these limitations and improve generalization capabilities, real-world data can be incorporated in the training process:
Data Augmentation: Augment synthetic data with realistic transformations to simulate real-world variations. This can help bridge the domain gap and improve model robustness.
Transfer Learning: Pretrain the model on synthetic data and then fine-tune it on a smaller set of real-world data. This transfer learning approach can leverage the strengths of synthetic data while adapting the model to real-world scenarios.
Domain Adaptation: Use techniques like domain adaptation to align the feature distributions of synthetic and real data, reducing the domain gap and improving generalization.
Hybrid Datasets: Create hybrid datasets that combine synthetic and real data to provide a more diverse and representative training set for the model.

Given the impressive performance of Marigold on affine-invariant depth estimation, how could the model be adapted to also handle the estimation of absolute metric depth, and what additional challenges would that entail

To adapt Marigold for absolute metric depth estimation, several modifications and challenges need to be considered:

Normalization: Adjust the normalization scheme to output absolute depth values instead of affine-invariant depth. This may involve scaling the predictions to match real-world depth units.
Training Data: Incorporate real-world depth datasets with absolute depth annotations to fine-tune the model for metric depth estimation. This will help the model learn the scale and absolute depth values of different objects and scenes.
Loss Function: Modify the loss function to optimize for absolute depth accuracy, considering metrics like mean squared error or root mean squared error to penalize deviations in depth values.
Evaluation Metrics: Use evaluation metrics specific to absolute depth estimation, such as mean absolute error or root mean squared error, to assess the model's performance accurately.
Challenges: Estimating absolute metric depth introduces challenges related to scale ambiguity, sensor calibration, and scene understanding. The model needs to account for these factors to provide accurate depth predictions in real-world settings.