# Unsupervised Depth Completion from Visual Inertial Odometry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08616 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08616/

## Key facts

- Cited by 89 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 89)

- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Depth Completion with Calibrated Backprojection Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10531/) (2021)
- [Marigold-DC: Zero-Shot Monocular Depth Completion with Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13389/) (2024)
- [LRRU: Long-short Range Recurrent Updating Networks for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08956/) (2023)
- [Tri-Perspective View Decomposition for Geometry-Aware Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15008/) (2024)
- [Learning Topology from Synthetic Data for Unsupervised Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02994/) (2021)
- [WorDepth: Variational Language Prior for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03635/) (2024)
- [Deep Depth Completion from Extremely Sparse Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05335/) (2022)
- [Not Just Streaks: Towards Ground Truth for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10779/) (2022)
- [An Adaptive Framework for Learning Unsupervised Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03010/) (2021)
- [OMNI-DC: Highly Robust Depth Completion with Multiresolution Depth Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19278/) (2024)
- [DesNet: Decomposed Scale-Consistent Network for Unsupervised Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10994/) (2022)
- [Sparsity Agnostic Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00790/) (2022)
- [Test-Time Adaptation for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03312/) (2024)
- [Depth Prompting for Sensor-Agnostic Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11867/) (2024)
- [Monitored Distillation for Positive Congruent Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16034/) (2022)
- [OGNI-DC: Robust Depth Completion with Optimization-Guided Neural Iterations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11711/) (2024)
- [Bayesian Deep Basis Fitting for Depth Completion with Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15254/) (2021)
- [Multi-Modal Masked Pre-Training for Monocular Panoramic Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09855/) (2022)
- [Advances in Multimodal Adaptation and Generalization: From Traditional Approaches to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18592/) (2025)
- [ALTO: Alternating Latent Topologies for Implicit 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04096/) (2022)
- [RSA: Resolving Scale Ambiguities in Monocular Depth Estimators through Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02924/) (2024)
- [RadarCam-Depth: Radar-Camera Fusion for Depth Estimation with Learned Metric Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04325/) (2024)
- [A Surface Geometry Model for LiDAR Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08466/) (2021)
- [Monocular Visual-Inertial Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12134/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Depth Completion from a Stereo Matching Perspective for Cross-domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09254/) (2023)
- [Stereoscopic Universal Perturbations across Different Architectures and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06116/) (2021)
- [AugUndo: Scaling Up Augmentations for Monocular Depth Completion and Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09739/) (2023)
- [Distilling Monocular Foundation Model for Fine-grained Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16970/) (2025)
- [Learnable Differencing Center for Nighttime Depth Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14538/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We describe a method to infer dense depth from camera motion and sparse depth as estimated using a visual-inertial odometry system. Unlike other scenarios using point clouds from lidar or structured light sensors, we have few hundreds to few thousand points, insufficient to inform the topology of the scene. Our method first constructs a piecewise planar scaffolding of the scene, and then uses it to infer dense depth using the image along with the sparse points. We use a predictive cross-modal criterion, akin to `self-supervision,' measuring photometric consistency across time, forward-backward pose consistency, and geometric compatibility with the sparse point cloud. We also launch the first visual-inertial + depth dataset, which we hope will foster additional exploration into combining the complementary strengths of visual and inertial sensors. To compare our method to prior work, we adopt the unsupervised KITTI depth completion benchmark, and show state-of-the-art performance on it. Code available at: https://github.com/alexklwong/unsupervised-depth-completion-visual-inertial-odometry.