Title: Joint Prediction of Depths, Normals and Surface Curvature from RGB Images using CNNs,
Abstract: Understanding the 3D structure of a scene is of vital importance, when it
comes to developing fully autonomous robots. To this end, we present a novel
deep learning based framework that estimates depth, surface normals and surface
curvature by only using a single RGB image. To the best of our knowledge this
is the first work to estimate surface curvature from colour using a machine
learning approach. Additionally, we demonstrate that by tuning the network to
infer well designed features, such as surface curvature, we can achieve
improved performance at estimating depth and normals.This indicates that
network guidance is still a useful aspect of designing and training a neural
network. We run extensive experiments where the network is trained to infer
different tasks while the model capacity is kept constant resulting in
different feature maps based on the tasks at hand. We outperform the previous
state-of-the-art benchmarks which jointly estimate depths and surface normals
while predicting surface curvature in parallel.