Enhanced blur-robust monocular depth estimation via self-supervised learning

This letter presents a novel self-supervised learning strategy to improve the robustness of a monocular depth estimation (MDE) network against motion blur. Motion blur, a common problem in real-world applications like autonomous driving and scene reconstruction, often hinders accurate depth perception. Conventional MDE methods are effective under controlled conditions but struggle to generalise their performance to blurred images. To address this problem, we generate blur-synthesised data to train a robust MDE model without the need for preprocessing, such as deblurring. By incorporating self-distillation techniques and using blur-synthesised data, the depth estimation accuracy for blurred images is significantly enhanced without additional computational or memory overhead. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, enhancing existing MDE models to accurately estimate depth information across various blur conditions. © 2024 The Author(s). Electronics Letters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology.