Deep(ly) Learning the Depth

We report on the use of deep learning algorithms to perform depth recovery in multiview imaging. We show that if enough training data are provided, a neural network such as multilayer perceptron can be trained to recover the depth in multiview imaging as a regression problem. Such a method can replace camera calibration since no knowledge on the camera configuration is required during training. Another advantage of deep learning for this problem, is the speed of testing; typically a few microseconds per point in the scene. This is a lot better than state-of-art algorithms that require to solve a full optimization problem. In a second part, we have studied a related problem: detecting changes in the camera setting. We have shown that deep learning classifiers can recognize amongst a few (4 or 5) camera settings based only on the projections of points on the cameras, with less than 1% classification error. This is a promising step towards the SLAM problem.