In this article, we tackle the problem of depth estimation from single monocular images. Compared with depth estimation using multiple images such as stereo depth perception, depth from monocular images is much more challenging. Prior work typically focuses on exploiting geometric priors or additional sources of information, most using hand-crafted features. Recently, there is mounting evidence that features from deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) set new records for various vision applications. On the other hand, considering the continuous characteristic of the depth values, depth estimations can be naturally formulated as a continuous conditional random field (CRF) learning problem. Therefore, here we present a deep convolutional neural field model for estimating depths from single monocular images, aiming to jointly explore the capacity of deep CNN and continuous CRF. In particular, we propose a deep structured learning scheme which learns the unary and pairwise potentials of continuous CRF in a unified deep CNN framework. We then further propose an equally effective model based on fully convolutional networks and a novel superpixel pooling method, which is $\sim 10$ times faster, to speedup the patch-wise convolutions in the deep model. With this more efficient model, we are able to design deeper networks to pursue better performance. Experiments on both indoor and outdoor scene datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art depth estimation approaches.

本文提出了一种使用卷积神经网络和条件随机场的深度学习模型，针对单目图像的深度估计问题，其中结构化的学习框架学习连续CRF的一元和二元势函数；基于全卷积网络和新的超像素池化方法，提出了一种更有效的模型，在室内外场景数据集上表现优于现有的深度估计方法。

使用深度卷积神经场从单目图像中学习深度