# Learning Depth from Single Monocular Images Using Deep Convolutional Neural Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.07411 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.07411/

## Key facts

- Cited by 169 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 169)

- [Point-NeRF: Point-based Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08845/) (2022)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [NoPe-NeRF: Optimising Neural Radiance Field with No Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07388/) (2022)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [P3Depth: Monocular Depth Estimation with a Piecewise Planarity Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02091/) (2022)
- [Lite-Mono: A Lightweight CNN and Transformer Architecture for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13202/) (2022)
- [NeuTex: Neural Texture Mapping for Volumetric Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00762/) (2021)
- [UniFuse: Unidirectional Fusion for 360circ Panorama Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03550/) (2021)
- [StyleRF: Zero-shot 3D Style Transfer of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10598/) (2023)
- [SurroundDepth: Entangling Surrounding Views for Self-Supervised Multi-Camera Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03636/) (2022)
- [iDisc: Internal Discretization for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06334/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth and Ego-Motion Estimation in Endoscopy: Appearance Flow to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08122/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11610/) (2021)
- [Deep Animation Video Interpolation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02495/) (2021)
- [Behind the Scenes: Density Fields for Single View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07668/) (2023)
- [UniK3D: Universal Camera Monocular 3D Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16591/) (2025)
- [Fine-grained Semantics-aware Representation Enhancement for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08829/) (2021)
- [VA-DepthNet: A Variational Approach to Single Image Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06556/) (2023)
- [SC-DepthV3: Robust Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03660/) (2022)
- [RoboDepth: Robust Out-of-Distribution Depth Estimation under Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15171/) (2023)
- [Virtual Normal: Enforcing Geometric Constraints for Accurate and Robust Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04216/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Surface Normal Constraint for Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15483/) (2021)
- [Towards Accurate Reconstruction of 3D Scene Shape from A Single Monocular Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13241/) (2022)
- [NeuralEditor: Editing Neural Radiance Fields via Manipulating Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03049/) (2023)
- [OccNeRF: Advancing 3D Occupancy Prediction in LiDAR-Free Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09243/) (2023)
- [StructDepth: Leveraging the structural regularities for self-supervised indoor depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08574/) (2021)
- [RA-Depth: Resolution Adaptive Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11984/) (2022)
- [SOSD-Net: Joint Semantic Object Segmentation and Depth Estimation from Monocular images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07422/) (2021)
- [Learning to Relate Depth and Semantics for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07830/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this article, we tackle the problem of depth estimation from single monocular images. Compared with depth estimation using multiple images such as stereo depth perception, depth from monocular images is much more challenging. Prior work typically focuses on exploiting geometric priors or additional sources of information, most using hand-crafted features. Recently, there is mounting evidence that features from deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) set new records for various vision applications. On the other hand, considering the continuous characteristic of the depth values, depth estimations can be naturally formulated as a continuous conditional random field (CRF) learning problem. Therefore, here we present a deep convolutional neural field model for estimating depths from single monocular images, aiming to jointly explore the capacity of deep CNN and continuous CRF. In particular, we propose a deep structured learning scheme which learns the unary and pairwise potentials of continuous CRF in a unified deep CNN framework. We then further propose an equally effective model based on fully convolutional networks and a novel superpixel pooling method, which is ~ 10 times faster, to speedup the patch-wise convolutions in the deep model. With this more efficient model, we are able to design deeper networks to pursue better performance. Experiments on both indoor and outdoor scene datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art depth estimation approaches.