360° Depth Estimation from Multiple Fisheye Images with Origami Crown Representation of Icosahedron

概要

In this study, we present a method for all-around depth estimation from multiple omnidirectional images for indoor environments. In particular, we focus on plane-sweeping stereo as the method for depth estimation from the images. We propose a new icosahedron-based representation and ConvNets for omnidirectional images, which we name “CrownConv” because the representation resembles a crown made of origami. CrownConv can be applied to both fisheye images and equirectangular images to extract features. Furthermore, we propose icosahedron-based spherical sweeping for generating the cost volume on an icosahedron from the extracted features. The cost volume is regularized using the three-dimensional CrownConv, and the final depth is obtained by depth regression from the cost volume. Our proposed method is robust to camera alignments by using the extrinsic camera parameters; therefore, it can achieve precise depth estimation even when the camera align- ment differs from that in the training dataset. We evaluate the proposed model on synthetic datasets and demonstrate its effec- tiveness. As our proposed method is computationally efficient, the depth is estimated from four fisheye images in less than a second using a laptop with a GPU. Therefore, it is suitable for real-world robotics applications. Our source code is available at https://github.com/matsuren/crownconv360depth.