Combining semantic scene priors and haze removal for single image depth estimation

Abstract

We consider the problem of estimating the relative depth of a scene from a monocular image. The dark channel prior, used as a statistical observation of haze free images, has been previously leveraged for haze removal and relative depth estimation tasks. However, as a local measure, it fails to account for higher order semantic relationship among scene elements. We propose a dual channel prior used for identifying pixels that are unlikely to comply with the dark channel assumption, leading to erroneous depth estimates. We further leverage semantic segmentation information and patch match label propagation to enforce semantically consistent geometric priors. Experiments illustrate the quantitative and qualitative advantages of our approach when compared to state of the art methods.