Contrastive Learning for Depth Prediction

Depth prediction is at the core of several computer vision applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. It is often formulated as a regression task in which depth values are estimated through network layers. Unfortunately, the distribution of values on depth maps is seldom explored. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel framework combining contrastive learning and depth prediction, allowing us to pay more attention to depth distribution and consequently enabling improvements to the overall estimation process. Purposely, we propose a window-based contrastive learning module, which partitions the feature maps into non-overlapping windows and constructs contrastive loss within each one. Forming and sorting positive and negative pairs, then enlarging the gap between the two in the representation space, constraints depth distribution to fit the feature of the depth map. Experiments on KITTI and NYU datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.