# Excavating the Potential Capacity of Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.12484 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12484/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 51 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2021.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [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)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [Born Again Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04770/) (2018)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04992/) (2016)
- [A Comprehensive Overhaul of Feature Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01866/) (2019)
- [GeoNet: Unsupervised Learning of Dense Depth, Optical Flow and Camera Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02276/) (2018)
- [Correlation Congruence for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01802/) (2019)
- [Competitive Collaboration: Joint Unsupervised Learning of Depth, Camera Motion, Optical Flow and Motion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09806/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [RA-Depth: Resolution Adaptive Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11984/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation: Let's Talk About The Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08357/) (2023)
- [WorDepth: Variational Language Prior for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03635/) (2024)
- [PlaneDepth: Self-supervised Depth Estimation via Orthogonal Planes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01612/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation: Overcoming Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16698/) (2024)
- [DevNet: Self-supervised Monocular Depth Learning via Density Volume Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06351/) (2022)
- [Synthetic-to-Real Self-supervised Robust Depth Estimation via Learning with Motion and Structure Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20211/) (2025)
- [SQLdepth: Generalizable Self-Supervised Fine-Structured Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00526/) (2023)
- [RSA: Resolving Scale Ambiguities in Monocular Depth Estimators through Language Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02924/) (2024)
- [Jasmine: Harnessing Diffusion Prior for Self-supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15905/) (2025)
- [Self-distilled Feature Aggregation for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07088/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Training of Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation against Physical-World Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13487/) (2023)
- [WeatherDepth: Curriculum Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Depth Estimation under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05556/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-based Depth Estimation Methods from Monocular Image and Videos: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19675/) (2024)
- [GasMono: Geometry-Aided Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16019/) (2023)
- [MonoDiffusion: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07198/) (2023)
- [DCPI-Depth: Explicitly Infusing Dense Correspondence Prior to Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16960/) (2024)
- [The Third Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16831/) (2024)
- [Mono-ViFI: A Unified Learning Framework for Self-supervised Single- and Multi-frame Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14126/) (2024)
- [Extending Foundational Monocular Depth Estimators to Fisheye Cameras with Calibration Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04928/) (2025)
- [THE Benchmark: Transferable Representation Learning for Monocular Height Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14985/) (2021)
- [Visual Attention-based Self-supervised Absolute Depth Estimation using Geometric Priors in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08780/) (2022)
- [Two-in-One Depth: Bridging the Gap Between Monocular and Binocular Self-supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00933/) (2023)
- [SPIdepth: Strengthened Pose Information for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12501/) (2024)
- [The Fourth Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17787/) (2025)
- [RAFT-MSF: Self-Supervised Monocular Scene Flow using Recurrent Optimizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01568/) (2022)
- [Towards Cross-View-Consistent Self-Supervised Surround Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04041/) (2024)
- [MonoProb: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Interpretable Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06137/) (2023)
- [Dusk Till Dawn: Self-supervised Nighttime Stereo Depth Estimation using Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11158/) (2024)
- [EC-Depth: Exploring the consistency of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in challenging scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08044/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised methods play an increasingly important role in monocular depth estimation due to their great potential and low annotation cost. To close the gap with supervised methods, recent works take advantage of extra constraints, e.g., semantic segmentation. However, these methods will inevitably increase the burden on the model. In this paper, we show theoretical and empirical evidence that the potential capacity of self-supervised monocular depth estimation can be excavated without increasing this cost. In particular, we propose (1) a novel data augmentation approach called data grafting, which forces the model to explore more cues to infer depth besides the vertical image position, (2) an exploratory self-distillation loss, which is supervised by the self-distillation label generated by our new post-processing method - selective post-processing, and (3) the full-scale network, designed to endow the encoder with the specialization of depth estimation task and enhance the representational power of the model. Extensive experiments show that our contributions can bring significant performance improvement to the baseline with even less computational overhead, and our model, named EPCDepth, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art methods even those supervised by additional constraints.