EchoDiffusion: Waveform Conditioned Diffusion Models for Echo-Based Depth Estimation

Wenjie Zhang, Jun Yin, Long Ma, Peng Yu, Xiaoheng Jiang, Zhen Tian, Mingliang Xu

Abstract: To extract spatial information, depth estimation using conventional echo-based methods typically employs models with encoder-decoder architectures, such as UNet. However, these methods may face challenges in extracting fine details from echo waveforms and handling multi-scale feature extraction with high precision. To address these challenges, we introduce EchoDiffusion, a framework that incorporates diffusion models conditioned on waveform embeddings for echo-based depth estimation. This framework employs the Multi-Scale Adaptive Latent Feature Network (MALF-Net) to extract multi-scale spatial features and perform adaptive fusion, encoding the echo spectrograms into the latent space. Additionally, we propose the Echo Waveform Detail Embedder (EWDE), which leverages a pre-trained Wav2Vec model to extract detailed spatial information from echo waveforms, using these details as conditional inputs to guide the reverse diffusion process in the latent space. By embedding the echo waveforms into the reverse diffusion process, we can more accurately guide the generation of depth maps. Our extensive evaluations on the Replica and Matterport3D datasets demonstrate that EchoDiffusion establishes new benchmarks for state-of-the-art performance in echo-based depth estimation.