ActiveZero++: Mixed Domain Learning Stereo and Confidence-Based Depth Completion With Zero Annotation

Learning-based stereo methods usually require a large scale dataset with depth, however obtaining accurate depth in the real domain is difficult, but groundtruth depth is readily available in the simulation domain. In this article we propose a new framework, ActiveZero++, which is a mixed domain learning solution for active stereovision systems that requires no real world depth annotation. In the simulation domain, we use a combination of supervised disparity loss and self-supervised loss on a shape primitives dataset. By contrast, in the real domain, we only use self-supervised loss on a dataset that is out-of-distribution from either training simulation data or test real data. To improve the robustness and accuracy of our reprojection loss in hard-to-perceive regions, our method introduces a novel self-supervised loss called temporal IR reprojection. Further, we propose the confidence-based depth completion module, which uses the confidence from the stereo network to identify and improve erroneous areas in depth prediction through depth-normal consistency. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on real-world data demonstrate state-of-the-art results that can even outperform a commercial depth sensor. Furthermore, our method can significantly narrow the Sim2Real domain gap of depth maps for state-of-the-art learning based 6D pose estimation algorithms.