RTS-Mono: A Real-Time Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Method for Real-World Deployment

Depth information is crucial for autonomous driving and intelligent robot navigation. The simplicity and flexibility of self-supervised monocular depth estimation are conducive to its role in these fields. However, most existing monocular depth estimation models consume many computing resources. Although some methods have reduced the model's size and improved computing efficiency, the performance deteriorates, seriously hindering the real-world deployment of self-supervised monocular depth estimation models in the real world. To address this problem, we proposed a real-time self-supervised monocular depth estimation method and implemented it in the real world. It is called RTS-Mono, which is a lightweight and efficient encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder is based on Lite-Encoder, and the decoder is designed with a multi-scale sparse fusion framework to minimize redundancy, ensure performance, and improve inference speed. RTS-Mono achieved state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in high and low resolutions with extremely low parameter counts (3 M) in experiments based on the KITTI dataset. Compared with lightweight methods, RTS-Mono improved Abs Rel and Sq Rel by 5.6% and 9.8% at low resolution and improved Sq Rel and RMSE by 6.1% and 1.9% at high resolution. In real-world deployment experiments, RTS-Mono has extremely high accuracy and can perform real-time inference on Nvidia Jetson Orin at a speed of 49 FPS. Source code is available at https://github.com/ZYCheng777/RTS-Mono.

Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation from the Vision Foundation Model for Enhanced Medical Image Segmentation

Large-scale pre-trained models, such as Vision Foundation Models (VFMs), have demonstrated impressive performance across various downstream tasks by transferring generalized knowledge, especially when target data is limited. However, their high computational cost and the domain gap between natural and medical images limit their practical application in medical segmentation tasks. Motivated by this, we pose the following important question: "How can we effectively utilize the knowledge of large pre-trained VFMs to train a small, task-specific model for medical image segmentation when training data is limited?" To address this problem, we propose a novel and generalizable task-specific knowledge distillation framework. Our method fine-tunes the VFM on the target segmentation task to capture task-specific features before distilling the knowledge to smaller models, leveraging Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to reduce the computational cost of fine-tuning. Additionally, we incorporate synthetic data generated by diffusion models to augment the transfer set, enhancing model performance in data-limited scenarios. Experimental results across five medical image datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms task-agnostic knowledge distillation and self-supervised pretraining approaches like MoCo v3 and Masked Autoencoders (MAE). For example, on the KidneyUS dataset, our method achieved a 28% higher Dice score than task-agnostic KD using 80 labeled samples for fine-tuning. On the CHAOS dataset, it achieved an 11% improvement over MAE with 100 labeled samples. These results underscore the potential of task-specific knowledge distillation to train accurate, efficient models for medical image segmentation in data-constrained settings.