DEUX: Active Exploration for Learning Unsupervised Depth Perception
Marvin Chancán Alex Wong Ian Abraham
Depth perception models are typically trained on non-interactive datasets
with predefined camera trajectories. However, this often introduces systematic
biases into the learning process correlated to specific camera paths chosen
during data acquisition. In this paper, we investigate the role of how data is
collected for learning depth completion, from a robot navigation perspective,
by leveraging 3D interactive environments. First, we evaluate four depth
completion models trained on data collected using conventional navigation
techniques. Our key insight is that existing exploration paradigms do not
necessarily provide task-specific data points to achieve competent unsupervised
depth completion learning. We then find that data collected with respect to
photometric reconstruction has a direct positive influence on model
performance. As a result, we develop an active, task-informed, depth
uncertainty-based motion planning approach for learning depth completion, which
we call DEpth Uncertainty-guided eXploration (DEUX). Training with data
collected by our approach improves depth completion by an average greater than
18% across four depth completion models compared to existing exploration
methods on the MP3D test set. We show that our approach further improves
zero-shot generalization, while offering new insights into integrating robot
learning-based depth estimation.