# Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04992/

## Key facts

- Cited by 368 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 368)

- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic and Geometric Depth: Detecting Objects in Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14160/) (2021)
- [The Temporal Opportunist: Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14540/) (2021)
- [Splatt3R: Zero-shot Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13912/) (2024)
- [BinsFormer: Revisiting Adaptive Bins for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00987/) (2022)
- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [MINE: Towards Continuous Depth MPI with NeRF for Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14910/) (2021)
- [DepthFormer: Exploiting Long-Range Correlation and Local Information for Accurate Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14211/) (2022)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01923/) (2023)
- [P3Depth: Monocular Depth Estimation with a Piecewise Planarity Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02091/) (2022)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Scale-Aware Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17253/) (2023)
- [Geometry-Free View Synthesis: Transformers and no 3D Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07652/) (2021)
- [Lite-Mono: A Lightweight CNN and Transformer Architecture for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13202/) (2022)
- [Attention Attention Everywhere: Monocular Depth Prediction with Skip Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09071/) (2022)
- [UniFuse: Unidirectional Fusion for 360circ Panorama Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03550/) (2021)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14816/) (2023)
- [MonoDETR: Depth-guided Transformer for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13310/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13613/) (2021)
- [iDisc: Internal Discretization for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06334/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11610/) (2021)
- [RGB-D Local Implicit Function for Depth Completion of Transparent Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00622/) (2021)
- [Multi-Frame Self-Supervised Depth with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07616/) (2022)
- [UniK3D: Universal Camera Monocular 3D Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16591/) (2025)
- [DOVE: Learning Deformable 3D Objects by Watching Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10844/) (2021)
- [OmniFusion: 360 Monocular Depth Estimation via Geometry-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00838/) (2022)
- [360MonoDepth: High-Resolution 360deg Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15669/) (2021)
- [Learning Monocular Depth in Dynamic Scenes via Instance-Aware Projection Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02629/) (2021)
- [Global-Local Path Networks for Monocular Depth Estimation with Vertical CutDepth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07436/) (2022)
- [Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09711/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A significant weakness of most current deep Convolutional Neural Networks is the need to train them using vast amounts of manu- ally labelled data. In this work we propose a unsupervised framework to learn a deep convolutional neural network for single view depth predic- tion, without requiring a pre-training stage or annotated ground truth depths. We achieve this by training the network in a manner analogous to an autoencoder. At training time we consider a pair of images, source and target, with small, known camera motion between the two such as a stereo pair. We train the convolutional encoder for the task of predicting the depth map for the source image. To do so, we explicitly generate an inverse warp of the target image using the predicted depth and known inter-view displacement, to reconstruct the source image; the photomet- ric error in the reconstruction is the reconstruction loss for the encoder. The acquisition of this training data is considerably simpler than for equivalent systems, requiring no manual annotation, nor calibration of depth sensor to camera. We show that our network trained on less than half of the KITTI dataset (without any further augmentation) gives com- parable performance to that of the state of art supervised methods for single view depth estimation.