NeRFmentation: NeRF-based Augmentation for Monocular Depth Estimation

The capabilities of monocular depth estimation (MDE) models are limited by the availability of sufficient and diverse datasets. In the case of MDE models for autonomous driving, this issue is exacerbated by the linearity of the captured data trajectories. We propose a NeRF-based data augmentation pipeline to introduce synthetic data with more diverse viewing directions into training datasets and demonstrate the benefits of our approach to model performance and robustness. Our data augmentation pipeline, which we call "NeRFmentation", trains NeRFs on each scene in the dataset, filters out subpar NeRFs based on relevant metrics, and uses them to generate synthetic RGB-D images captured from new viewing directions. In this work, we apply our technique in conjunction with three state-of-the-art MDE architectures on the popular autonomous driving dataset KITTI, augmenting its training set of the Eigen split. We evaluate the resulting performance gain on the original test set, a separate popular driving set, and our own synthetic test set.