LiRCDepth: Lightweight Radar-Camera Depth Estimation via Knowledge Distillation and Uncertainty Guidance
Huawei Sun, Nastassia Vysotskaya, Tobias Sukianto, Hao Feng, Julius Ott, Xiangyuan Peng, Lorenzo Servadei, Robert Wille
Abstract
Recently, radar-camera fusion algorithms have gained significant attention as radar sensors provide geometric information that complements the limitations of cameras. However, most existing radar-camera depth estimation algorithms focus solely on improving performance, often neglecting computational efficiency. To address this gap, we propose LiRCDepth, a lightweight radar-camera depth estimation model. We incorporate knowledge distillation to enhance the training process, transferring critical information from a complex teacher model to our lightweight student model in three key domains. Firstly, low-level and high-level features are transferred by incorporating pixel-wise and pair-wise distillation. Additionally, we introduce an uncertainty-aware inter-depth distillation loss to refine intermediate depth maps during decoding. Leveraging our proposed knowledge distillation scheme, the lightweight model achieves a 6.6% improvement in MAE on the nuScenes dataset compared to the model trained without distillation. Code: https://github.com/harborsarah/LiRCDepth
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icassp2025_lircdepthlightwe,
title = {LiRCDepth: Lightweight Radar-Camera Depth Estimation via Knowledge Distillation and Uncertainty Guidance},
author = {Huawei Sun and Nastassia Vysotskaya and Tobias Sukianto and Hao Feng and Julius Ott and Xiangyuan Peng and Lorenzo Servadei and Robert Wille},
booktitle = {ICASSP 2025},
year = {2025}
}