Sensing Range Extension for Short-Baseline Stereo Camera Using Monocular Depth Estimation

This paper proposes a method to extend a sensing range of a short-baseline stereo camera (SBSC). The proposed method combines a stereo depth and a monocular depth estimated by a convolutional neural network-based monocular depth estimation (MDE). To combine a stereo depth and a monocular depth, the proposed method estimates a scale factor of a monocular depth using stereo depth–mono depth pairs and then combines the two depths. Another advantage of the proposed method is that the trained MDE model may be utilized for different environments without retraining. The performance of the proposed method is verified qualitatively and quantitatively using the directly collected and open datasets.