  We present a novel method to train machine learning algorithms to estimate
scene depths from a single image, by using the information provided by a
camera's aperture as supervision. Prior works use a depth sensor's outputs or
images of the same scene from alternate viewpoints as supervision, while our
method instead uses images from the same viewpoint taken with a varying camera
aperture. To enable learning algorithms to use aperture effects as supervision,
we introduce two differentiable aperture rendering functions that use the input
image and predicted depths to simulate the depth-of-field effects caused by
real camera apertures. We train a monocular depth estimation network end-to-end
to predict the scene depths that best explain these finite aperture images as
defocus-blurred renderings of the input all-in-focus image.
