Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-Shot Cross-Dataset Transfer

The success of monocular depth estimation relies on large and diverse training sets. Due to the challenges associated with acquiring dense ground-truth depth across different environments at scale, a number of datasets with distinct characteristics and biases have emerged. We develop tools that enable mixing multiple datasets during training, even if their annotations are incompatible. In particular, we propose a training objective that is invariant to changes in depth range and scale. Armed with this objective, we explore an abundant source of training data: 3D films. We demonstrate that despite pervasive inaccuracies, 3D films constitute a useful source of data that is complementary to existing training sets. We evaluate the presented approach on diverse datasets, focusing on zero-shot cross-dataset transfer: testing the generality of the learned model by evaluating it on datasets that were not seen during training. The experiments confirm that mixing data from complementary sources yields improved depth estimates, particularly on previously unseen datasets. Some results are shown in the supplementary video: https://youtu.be/ITI0YS6IrUQ