Depth Estimation of a Deformable Object via a Monocular Camera

Abstract

The depth estimation of the 3D deformable object has become increasingly crucial to various intelligent applications. In this paper, we propose a feature-based approach for accurate depth estimation of a deformable 3D object with a single camera, which reduces the problem of depth estimation to a pose estimation problem. The proposed method needs to reconstruct the target object at the very beginning. With the 3D reconstruction as an a priori model, only one monocular image is required afterwards to estimate the target object’s depth accurately, regardless of pose changes or deformability of the object. Experiments are taken on an NAO robot and a human to evaluate the depth estimation accuracy by the proposed method.