# Attention meets Geometry: Geometry Guided Spatial-Temporal Attention for Consistent Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.08192 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08192/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (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)
- [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)
- [Exploring Self-attention for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13621/) (2020)
- [Dilated Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09914/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth and Ego-motion Learning from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10553/) (2019)
- [Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15021/) (2020)
- [The Temporal Opportunist: Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14540/) (2021)
- [Robust Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05901/) (2020)
- [Depth Prediction Without the Sensors: Leveraging Structure for Unsupervised Learning from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06152/) (2018)
- [Feature-metric Loss for Self-supervised Learning of Depth and Egomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10603/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Trained Depth Estimation using Self-attention and Discrete Disparity Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13951/) (2020)
- [Occlusion Aware Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05890/) (2017)
- [Dual-Resolution Correspondence Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08844/) (2020)
- [Deep Virtual Stereo Odometry: Leveraging Deep Depth Prediction for Monocular Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02570/) (2018)
- [Towards Better Generalization: Joint Depth-Pose Learning without PoseNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01314/) (2020)
- [Guiding Monocular Depth Estimation Using Depth-Attention Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02760/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Multi-Frame Self-Supervised Depth with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07616/) (2022)
- [Cross-View Completion Models are Zero-shot Correspondence Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09072/) (2024)
- [On the Importance of Accurate Geometry Data for Dense 3D Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14840/) (2023)
- [MAMo: Leveraging Memory and Attention for Monocular Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14336/) (2023)
- [Is my Depth Ground-Truth Good Enough? HAMMER -- Highly Accurate Multi-Modal Dataset for DEnse 3D Scene Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04565/) (2022)
- [FutureDepth: Learning to Predict the Future Improves Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12953/) (2024)
- [Crafting Monocular Cues and Velocity Guidance for Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Depth Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09170/) (2022)
- [Manydepth2: Motion-Aware Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15268/) (2023)
- [MonoPCC: Photometric-invariant Cycle Constraint for Monocular Depth Estimation of Endoscopic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16571/) (2024)
- [Mono-ViFI: A Unified Learning Framework for Self-supervised Single- and Multi-frame Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14126/) (2024)
- [GeoRefine: Self-Supervised Online Depth Refinement for Accurate Dense Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01656/) (2022)
- [NVDS+: Towards Efficient and Versatile Neural Stabilizer for Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08695/) (2023)
- [ProDepth: Boosting Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Monocular Depth with Probabilistic Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09303/) (2024)
- [A Study on the Generality of Neural Network Structures for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03169/) (2023)
- [CloudAttention: Efficient Multi-Scale Attention Scheme For 3D Point Cloud Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00524/) (2022)
- [Dyna-DepthFormer: Multi-frame Transformer for Self-Supervised Depth Estimation in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05871/) (2023)
- [Multi-Frame Self-Supervised Depth Estimation with Multi-Scale Feature Fusion in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14628/) (2023)
- [ADU-Depth: Attention-based Distillation with Uncertainty Modeling for Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14744/) (2023)
- [HQDec: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Based on a High-Quality Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18706/) (2023)
- [Geometric Constraints in Deep Learning Frameworks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12431/) (2024)
- [MonoDETRNext: Next-Generation Accurate and Efficient Monocular 3D Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15176/) (2024)
- [STATIC : Surface Temporal Affine for TIme Consistency in Video Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01090/) (2024)
- [CylinderDepth: Cylindrical Spatial Attention for Multi-View Consistent Self-Supervised Surround Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16428/) (2025)
- [Interpretable Vision Transformers in Monocular Depth Estimation via SVDA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11005/) (2026)
- [Pose Constraints for Consistent Self-supervised Monocular Depth and Ego-motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08916/) (2023)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation via Neural Network with Learnable Algebraic Group and Ring Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24328/) (2026)
- [CrossDepth: Geometry-Constrained Attention for Generalizable Multi-View Surround Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05397/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inferring geometrically consistent dense 3D scenes across a tuple of temporally consecutive images remains challenging for self-supervised monocular depth prediction pipelines. This paper explores how the increasingly popular transformer architecture, together with novel regularized loss formulations, can improve depth consistency while preserving accuracy. We propose a spatial attention module that correlates coarse depth predictions to aggregate local geometric information. A novel temporal attention mechanism further processes the local geometric information in a global context across consecutive images. Additionally, we introduce geometric constraints between frames regularized by photometric cycle consistency. By combining our proposed regularization and the novel spatial-temporal-attention module we fully leverage both the geometric and appearance-based consistency across monocular frames. This yields geometrically meaningful attention and improves temporal depth stability and accuracy compared to previous methods.