# Single Image Depth Prediction with Wavelet Decomposition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.02022 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02022/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03665/) (2016)
- [Empirical Evaluation of Rectified Activations in Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00853/) (2015)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04992/) (2016)
- [GeoNet: Unsupervised Learning of Dense Depth, Optical Flow and Camera Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02276/) (2018)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)
- [Slimmable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08928/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth and Ego-motion Learning from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10553/) (2019)
- [Competitive Collaboration: Joint Unsupervised Learning of Depth, Camera Motion, Optical Flow and Motion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09806/) (2018)
- [Depth from Videos in the Wild: Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning from Unknown Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04998/) (2019)
- [NetAdapt: Platform-Aware Neural Network Adaptation for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03230/) (2018)
- [Evaluation of CNN-based Single-Image Depth Estimation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01328/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Physical Attack on Monocular Depth Estimation with Optimal Adversarial Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04718/) (2022)
- [Glass Segmentation with RGB-Thermal Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05453/) (2022)
- [Deep Depth from Focus with Differential Focus Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01712/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation: Solving the Edge-Fattening Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00411/) (2022)
- [Perception-Distortion Balanced ADMM Optimization for Single-Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03324/) (2022)
- [Self-distilled Feature Aggregation for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07088/) (2022)
- [Elevation Estimation-Driven Building 3D Reconstruction from Single-View Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04581/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Training of Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation against Physical-World Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13487/) (2023)
- [RingMoE: Mixture-of-Modality-Experts Multi-Modal Foundation Models for Universal Remote Sensing Image Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03166/) (2025)
- [VDN-NeRF: Resolving Shape-Radiance Ambiguity via View-Dependence Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17968/) (2023)
- [WeatherDepth: Curriculum Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Depth Estimation under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05556/) (2023)
- [MonoDiffusion: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07198/) (2023)
- [DGECN: A Depth-Guided Edge Convolutional Network for End-to-End 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09983/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Self-Reference Distillation and Disparity Offset Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09789/) (2023)
- [SNeRV: Spectra-preserving Neural Representation for Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01681/) (2025)
- [RAFT-MSF: Self-Supervised Monocular Scene Flow using Recurrent Optimizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01568/) (2022)
- [Multi-Scale Wavelet Transformer for Face Forgery Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03899/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Adversarial Training of Monocular Depth Estimation against Physical-World Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05857/) (2024)
- [Hybrid Skip: A Biologically Inspired Skip Connection for the UNet Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04721/) (2022)
- [Neural Contourlet Network for Monocular 360 Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01817/) (2022)
- [Frequency-Aware Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05479/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Frame Interpolation in Wavelet Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03508/) (2023)
- [PASTA: Towards Flexible and Efficient HDR Imaging Via Progressively Aggregated Spatio-Temporal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10376/) (2024)
- [XctDiff: Reconstruction of CT Images with Consistent Anatomical Structures from a Single Radiographic Projection Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04679/) (2024)
- [SAMwave: Wavelet-Driven Feature Enrichment for Effective Adaptation of Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20186/) (2025)
- [Object-aware Monocular Depth Prediction with Instance Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01521/) (2021)
- [FSNet: Redesign Self-Supervised MonoDepth for Full-Scale Depth Prediction for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10719/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Skip Connections in Encoder-decoder Networks for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13441/) (2022)
- [InSpaceType: Reconsider Space Type in Indoor Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13516/) (2023)
- [FocDepthFormer: Transformer with latent LSTM for Depth Estimation from Focal Stack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11178/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a novel method for predicting accurate depths from monocular images with high efficiency. This optimal efficiency is achieved by exploiting wavelet decomposition, which is integrated in a fully differentiable encoder-decoder architecture. We demonstrate that we can reconstruct high-fidelity depth maps by predicting sparse wavelet coefficients. In contrast with previous works, we show that wavelet coefficients can be learned without direct supervision on coefficients. Instead we supervise only the final depth image that is reconstructed through the inverse wavelet transform. We additionally show that wavelet coefficients can be learned in fully self-supervised scenarios, without access to ground-truth depth. Finally, we apply our method to different state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models, in each case giving similar or better results compared to the original model, while requiring less than half the multiply-adds in the decoder network. Code at https://github.com/nianticlabs/wavelet-monodepth