  The ability to predict depth from a single image - using recent advances in
CNNs - is of increasing interest to the vision community. Unsupervised
strategies to learning are particularly appealing as they can utilize much
larger and varied monocular video datasets during learning without the need for
ground truth depth or stereo. In previous works, separate pose and depth CNN
predictors had to be determined such that their joint outputs minimized the
photometric error. Inspired by recent advances in direct visual odometry (DVO),
we argue that the depth CNN predictor can be learned without a pose CNN
predictor. Further, we demonstrate empirically that incorporation of a
differentiable implementation of DVO, along with a novel depth normalization
strategy - substantially improves performance over state of the art that use
monocular videos for training.
