We present a deep model that can accurately produce dense depth maps given an
RGB image with known depth at a very sparse set of pixels. The model works
simultaneously for both indoor/outdoor scenes and produces state-of-the-art
dense depth maps at nearly real-time speeds on both the NYUv2 and KITTI
datasets. We surpass the state-of-the-art for monocular depth estimation even
with depth values for only 1 out of every ~10000 image pixels, and we
outperform other sparse-to-dense depth methods at all sparsity levels. With
depth values for 1/256 of the image pixels, we achieve a mean absolute error of
less than 1% of actual depth on indoor scenes, comparable to the performance of
consumer-grade depth sensor hardware. Our experiments demonstrate that it would
indeed be possible to efficiently transform sparse depth measurements obtained
using e.g. lower-power depth sensors or SLAM systems into high-quality dense
depth maps.

本研究提出了一种深度模型，能在极少的像素点处获得 RGB 图像的已知深度情况下，精确地生成密集深度图，并能在 NYUv2 和 KITTI 数据集上实现近乎实时速度的室内 / 室外场景的高质量深度点云。与其他稀疏到密集深度方法相比，在每～10000 个像素中仅有一个像素的情况下，我们的深度估计准确度比现有最新算法还要高，仅在图像 1/256 的像素上估计，我们的精度就相当于消费级深度传感器的性能，本研究说明了将稀疏深度测量（如低功率深度传感器或 SLAM 系统获得）高效地转换成高质量的密集深度图是完全可能的。