  Depth estimation from a single image represents a very exciting challenge in
computer vision. While other image-based depth sensing techniques leverage on
the geometry between different viewpoints (e.g., stereo or structure from
motion), the lack of these cues within a single image renders ill-posed the
monocular depth estimation task. For inference, state-of-the-art
encoder-decoder architectures for monocular depth estimation rely on effective
feature representations learned at training time. For unsupervised training of
these models, geometry has been effectively exploited by suitable images
warping losses computed from views acquired by a stereo rig or a moving camera.
In this paper, we make a further step forward showing that learning semantic
information from images enables to improve effectively monocular depth
estimation as well. In particular, by leveraging on semantically labeled images
together with unsupervised signals gained by geometry through an image warping
loss, we propose a deep learning approach aimed at joint semantic segmentation
and depth estimation. Our overall learning framework is semi-supervised, as we
deploy groundtruth data only in the semantic domain. At training time, our
network learns a common feature representation for both tasks and a novel
cross-task loss function is proposed. The experimental findings show how,
jointly tackling depth prediction and semantic segmentation, allows to improve
depth estimation accuracy. In particular, on the KITTI dataset our network
outperforms state-of-the-art methods for monocular depth estimation.
