PLG-IN: Pluggable Geometric Consistency Loss with Wasserstein Distance in Monocular Depth Estimation

We propose a novel objective for penalizing geometric inconsistencies and improving the depth and pose estimation performance of monocular camera images. Our objective is designed using the Wasserstein distance between two point clouds, estimated from images with different camera poses. The Wasserstein distance can impose a soft and symmetric coupling between two point clouds, which suitably maintains geometric constraints and results in a differentiable objective. By adding our objective to those of other state-of-the-art methods, we can effectively penalize geometric inconsistencies and obtain highly accurate depth and pose estimations. Our proposed method was evaluated using the KITTI dataset.