# From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 382 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 382)

- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [DETR3D: 3D Object Detection from Multi-view Images via 3D-to-2D Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06922/) (2021)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [Categorical Depth Distribution Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01100/) (2021)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [SurroundOcc: Multi-Camera 3D Occupancy Prediction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09551/) (2023)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [Is Pseudo-Lidar needed for Monocular 3D Object detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06417/) (2021)
- [DepthCrafter: Generating Consistent Long Depth Sequences for Open-world Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02095/) (2024)
- [MiDaS v3.1 -- A Model Zoo for Robust Monocular Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14460/) (2023)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [BinsFormer: Revisiting Adaptive Bins for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00987/) (2022)
- [Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18124/) (2024)
- [NeW CRFs: Neural Window Fully-connected CRFs for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01502/) (2022)
- [DDP: Diffusion Model for Dense Visual Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17559/) (2023)
- [Transformer-Based Attention Networks for Continuous Pixel-Wise Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12091/) (2021)
- [On the Pitfalls of Heteroscedastic Uncertainty Estimation with Probabilistic Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09168/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Learning Temporally Consistent Video Depth from Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01493/) (2024)
- [LocalBins: Improving Depth Estimation by Learning Local Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15132/) (2022)
- [Attention Attention Everywhere: Monocular Depth Prediction with Skip Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09071/) (2022)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14816/) (2023)
- [Learning Indoor Inverse Rendering with 3D Spatially-Varying Lighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06061/) (2021)
- [DiffusionDepth: Diffusion Denoising Approach for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05021/) (2023)
- [Marigold: Affordable Adaptation of Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09358/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating accurate depth from a single image is challenging because it is an ill-posed problem as infinitely many 3D scenes can be projected to the same 2D scene. However, recent works based on deep convolutional neural networks show great progress with plausible results. The convolutional neural networks are generally composed of two parts: an encoder for dense feature extraction and a decoder for predicting the desired depth. In the encoder-decoder schemes, repeated strided convolution and spatial pooling layers lower the spatial resolution of transitional outputs, and several techniques such as skip connections or multi-layer deconvolutional networks are adopted to recover the original resolution for effective dense prediction. In this paper, for more effective guidance of densely encoded features to the desired depth prediction, we propose a network architecture that utilizes novel local planar guidance layers located at multiple stages in the decoding phase. We show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art works with significant margin evaluating on challenging benchmarks. We also provide results from an ablation study to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.