Intrinsic Image Decomposition for Robust Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation on Reflective Surfaces

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SSMDE) has gained attention in the field of deep learning as it estimates depth without requiring ground truth depth maps. This approach typically uses a photometric consistency loss between a synthesized image, generated from the estimated depth, and the original image, thereby reducing the need for extensive dataset acquisition. However, the conventional photometric consistency loss relies on the Lambertian assumption, which often leads to significant errors when dealing with reflective surfaces that deviate from this model. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework that incorporates intrinsic image decomposition into SSMDE. Our method synergistically trains for both monocular depth estimation and intrinsic image decomposition. The accurate depth estimation facilitates multi-image consistency for intrinsic image decomposition by aligning different view coordinate systems, while the decomposition process identifies reflective areas and excludes corrupted gradients from the depth training process. Furthermore, our framework introduces a pseudo-depth generation and knowledge distillation technique to further enhance the performance of the student model across both reflective and non-reflective surfaces. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms existing SSMDE baselines in depth prediction, especially on reflective surfaces.

Context-Aware Video Instance Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce the Context-Aware Video Instance Segmentation (CAVIS), a novel framework designed to enhance instance association by integrating contextual information adjacent to each object. To efficiently extract and leverage this information, we propose the Context-Aware Instance Tracker (CAIT), which merges contextual data surrounding the instances with the core instance features to improve tracking accuracy. Additionally, we introduce the Prototypical Cross-frame Contrastive (PCC) loss, which ensures consistency in object-level features across frames, thereby significantly enhancing instance matching accuracy. CAVIS demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on all benchmark datasets in video instance segmentation (VIS) and video panoptic segmentation (VPS). Notably, our method excels on the OVIS dataset, which is known for its particularly challenging videos.