Efficient Monocular Depth-Based Physical Distance Measurement for Low-Depth Scales

Beoungwoo Kang

Abstract: In this study, we introduce the physical distance estimator (PDE), a comprehensive framework designed to precisely measure the physical distance between two points on objects with a low-depth scale. The PDE utilizes monocular depth estimation to reconstruct 2-D depth maps into 3-D point clouds and calculates the physical distance between two points using the 3-D Euclidean distance. To achieve precise measurements for objects with low-depth scales, we configure a novel dataset using an RGB-Depth (RGB-D) camera to capture both RGB images and their depth maps of objects within low-depth scales, simulating various environmental conditions. We obtain a metric depth map by fine-tuning the monocular depth estimation model with the dataset. Furthermore, we applied knowledge distillation and FP16 optimization techniques to reduce the computational cost of PDE while maintaining high accuracy. These …