EC-Depth: Exploring the consistency of self-supervised monocular depth estimation under challenging scenes

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation holds significant importance in the fields of autonomous driving and robotics. However, existing methods are typically designed to train and test on clear and pristine datasets, overlooking the impact of various adverse conditions prevalent in real-world scenarios. As a result, it is commonly observed that most self-supervised monocular depth estimation methods struggle to perform adequately under challenging conditions. To address this issue, we present EC-Depth, a novel self-supervised two-stage training framework to achieve a robust depth estimation, starting from the foundation of depth prediction consistency under different perturbations. Leveraging the proposed perturbation-invariant depth consistency constraint module and the consistency-based pseudo-label selection module, our model attains accurate and consistent depth predictions in both standard and challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods on KITTI, KITTI-C and DrivingStereo benchmarks, demonstrating its potential for enhancing the reliability of self-supervised monocular depth estimation models in real-world applications.