This is a journal of my research on ml5.js during the summer of 2025, specifically on the topic of depth estimation and how it can best be a part of ml5. I'll try to write it as a single "article" with multiple chapters instead of a week-by-week blog.
An important part of this work has been started already by Alan Ren, developing an implementation of tensorflow's depth estimation into ml5.js. This is my starting point for this research.
Tensorflow's depth estimation uses the ARPortraitDepth model (See this 2022 Tensorflow Blog Post), which, as the name implies, is designed to do depth estimation specifically of portrait images, for purposes of AR on mobile phones. For this reason, it is a very lean model that can do estimation in rea