Virtually Enriched NYU Depth V2 Dataset for Monocular Depth Estimation: Do We Need Artificial Augmentation?

Published: 09 Apr 2024, Last Modified: 14 Apr 2024SynData4CVEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: synthetic augmentation, artificial augmentation, virtual reality, NYU depth dataset, monocular depth estimation
TL;DR: ANYU is a virtually augmented dataset for monocular depth estimation, created by incorporating RGB-D representations of virtual reality objects into the NYU depth v2 images.
Abstract: We present ANYU, a new virtually augmented version of the NYU depth v2 dataset, designed for monocular depth estimation. In contrast to the well-known approach where full 3D scenes of a virtual world are utilized to generate artificial datasets, ANYU was created by incorporating RGB-D representations of virtual reality objects into the original NYU depth v2 images. We specifically did not match each generated virtual object with an appropriate texture and a suitable location within the real-world image. Instead, an assignment of texture, location, lighting, and other rendering parameters was randomized to maximize a diversity of the training data, and to show that it is randomness that can improve the generalizing ability of a dataset. By conducting extensive experiments with our virtually modified dataset and validating on the original NYU depth v2 and iBims-1 benchmarks, we show that ANYU improves the monocular depth estimation performance and generalization of deep neural networks with considerably different architectures, especially for the current state-of-the-art VPD model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that augments a real-world dataset with randomly generated virtual 3D objects for monocular depth estimation. We make our ANYU dataset publicly available in two training configurations with 10\% and 100\% additional synthetically enriched RGB-D pairs of training images, respectively, for efficient training and empirical exploration of virtual augmentation.
Supplementary Material: pdf
Submission Number: 2
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