Weakly-Supervised Depth Completion During Robotic Micromanipulation from a Monocular Microscopic Image

Obtaining three-dimensional information, especially the z-axis depth information, is crucial for robotic micromanipulation. Due to the unavailability of depth sensors such as lidars in micromanipulation setups, traditional depth acquisition methods such as depth from focus or depth from defocus directly infer depth from microscopic images and suffer from poor resolution. Alternatively, micromanipulation tasks obtain accurate depth information by detecting the contact between an end-effector and an object (e.g., a cell). Despite its high accuracy, only sparse depth data can be obtained due to its low efficiency. This paper aims to address the challenge of acquiring dense depth information during robotic cell micromanipulation. A weakly-supervised depth completion network is proposed to take cell images and sparse depth data obtained by contact detection as input to generate a dense depth map. A two-stage data augmentation method is proposed to augment the sparse depth data, and the depth map is optimized by a network refinement method. The experimental results show that the MAE value of the depth prediction error is less than 0.3 mum, which proves the accuracy and effectiveness of the method. This deep learning network pipeline can be seamlessly integrated with the robotic micromanipulation tasks to provide accurate depth information.