# Learning monocular depth estimation infusing traditional stereo knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.04144 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04144/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09711/) (2023)
- [RoboDepth: Robust Out-of-Distribution Depth Estimation under Corruptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15171/) (2023)
- [Disentangling Object Motion and Occlusion for Unsupervised Multi-frame Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15174/) (2022)
- [Multi-View Depth Estimation by Fusing Single-View Depth Probability with Multi-View Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08177/) (2021)
- [OccNeRF: Advancing 3D Occupancy Prediction in LiDAR-Free Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09243/) (2023)
- [Learning Depth Estimation for Transparent and Mirror Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15052/) (2023)
- [Booster: a Benchmark for Depth from Images of Specular and Transparent Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08245/) (2023)
- [PLADE-Net: Towards Pixel-Level Accuracy for Self-Supervised Single-View Depth Estimation with Neural Positional Encoding and Distilled Matting Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07362/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation: Overcoming Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16698/) (2024)
- [Learning optical flow from still images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03965/) (2021)
- [Gradient-based Uncertainty for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02005/) (2022)
- [SVDistNet: Self-Supervised Near-Field Distance Estimation on Surround View Fisheye Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04420/) (2021)
- [Digging Into Uncertainty-based Pseudo-label for Robust Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16509/) (2023)
- [Kick Back & Relax: Learning to Reconstruct the World by Watching SlowTV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10713/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation: Solving the Edge-Fattening Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00411/) (2022)
- [Learning to Adapt CLIP for Few-Shot Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01034/) (2023)
- [Deconstructing Self-Supervised Monocular Reconstruction: The Design Decisions that Matter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01489/) (2022)
- [Self-distilled Feature Aggregation for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07088/) (2022)
- [AugUndo: Scaling Up Augmentations for Monocular Depth Completion and Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09739/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-based Depth Estimation Methods from Monocular Image and Videos: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19675/) (2024)
- [Computation-efficient Deep Learning for Computer Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13998/) (2023)
- [Advancing Self-supervised Monocular Depth Learning with Sparse LiDAR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09628/) (2021)
- [Plugging Self-Supervised Monocular Depth into Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06685/) (2021)
- [The Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12174/) (2022)
- [The RoboDepth Challenge: Methods and Advancements Towards Robust Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15061/) (2023)
- [GasMono: Geometry-Aided Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16019/) (2023)
- [Semi-Supervised Learning with Mutual Distillation for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09737/) (2022)
- [The Third Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16831/) (2024)
- [PanoDepth: A Two-Stage Approach for Monocular Omnidirectional Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01323/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Depth estimation from a single image represents a fascinating, yet challenging problem with countless applications. Recent works proved that this task could be learned without direct supervision from ground truth labels leveraging image synthesis on sequences or stereo pairs. Focusing on this second case, in this paper we leverage stereo matching in order to improve monocular depth estimation. To this aim we propose monoResMatch, a novel deep architecture designed to infer depth from a single input image by synthesizing features from a different point of view, horizontally aligned with the input image, performing stereo matching between the two cues. In contrast to previous works sharing this rationale, our network is the first trained end-to-end from scratch. Moreover, we show how obtaining proxy ground truth annotation through traditional stereo algorithms, such as Semi-Global Matching, enables more accurate monocular depth estimation still countering the need for expensive depth labels by keeping a self-supervised approach. Exhaustive experimental results prove how the synergy between i) the proposed monoResMatch architecture and ii) proxy-supervision attains state-of-the-art for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/fabiotosi92/monoResMatch-Tensorflow.