  Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as the state-of-the-art in
multiple vision tasks including depth estimation. However, memory and computing
power requirements remain as challenges to be tackled in these models.
Monocular depth estimation has significant use in robotics and virtual reality
that requires deployment on low-end devices. Training a small model from
scratch results in a significant drop in accuracy and it does not benefit from
pre-trained large models. Motivated by the literature of model pruning, we
propose a lightweight monocular depth model obtained from a large trained
model. This is achieved by removing the least important features with a novel
joint end-to-end filter pruning. We propose to learn a binary mask for each
filter to decide whether to drop the filter or not. These masks are trained
jointly to exploit relations between filters at different layers as well as
redundancy within the same layer. We show that we can achieve around 5x
compression rate with small drop in accuracy on the KITTI driving dataset. We
also show that masking can improve accuracy over the baseline with fewer
parameters, even without enforcing compression loss.
