Date of Award

12-2022

Degree Name

MS in Computer Science

Department/Program

Computer Science

College

College of Engineering

Advisor

Jonathan Ventura

Advisor Department

Computer Science

Advisor College

College of Engineering

Abstract

Depth perception has become a heavily researched area as companies and researchers are striving towards the development of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars rely on perceiving the surrounding area, which heavily depends on technology capable of providing the system with depth perception capabilities. In this paper, we explore developing a single camera (monocular) depth prediction model that is trained on panoramic depth images. Our model makes novel use of transfer learning efficient encoder models, pre-training on a larger dataset of flat depth images, and optimizing the model for use with a Jetson Nano. Additionally, we present a training and optimization framework to make developing and testing new monocular depth perception models easier and faster. While the model failed to achieve a high frame rate, the framework and models developed are a promising starting place for future work.

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