Learning Single Camera Depth Estimation using Dual-Pixels

Deep learning techniques have enabled rapid progress in monocular depth estimation, but their quality is limited by the ill-posed nature of the problem and the scarcity of high quality datasets. We estimate depth from a single camera by leveraging the dual-pixel auto-focus hardware that is increasingly common on modern camera sensors. Classic stereo algorithms and prior learning-based depth estimation techniques underperform when applied on this dualpixel data, the former due to too-strong assumptions about RGB image matching, and the latter due to not leveraging the understanding of optics of dual-pixel image formation. To allow learning based methods to work well on dual-pixel imagery, we identify an inherent ambiguity in the depth estimated from dual-pixel cues, and develop an approach to estimate depth up to this ambiguity. Using our approach, existing monocular depth estimation techniques can be effectively applied to dual-pixel data, and much smaller models can be constructed that still infer high quality depth. To demonstrate this, we capture a large dataset of in-the-wild 5-viewpoint RGB images paired with corresponding dualpixel data, and show how view supervision with this data can be used to learn depth up to the unknown ambiguity. On our new task, our model is 30% more accurate than any prior work on learning-based monocular or stereoscopic depth estimation.