# Monocular Depth Distribution Alignment with Low Computation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.04538 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04538/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [Transformer Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15436/) (2021)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Enforcing geometric constraints of virtual normal for depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12209/) (2019)
- [Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15021/) (2020)
- [CNN-SLAM: Real-time dense monocular SLAM with learned depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03489/) (2017)
- [Revisiting Single Image Depth Estimation: Toward Higher Resolution Maps with Accurate Object Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08673/) (2018)
- [Evaluation of CNN-based Single-Image Depth Estimation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01328/) (2018)
- [Monocular 3D Object Detection with Pseudo-LiDAR Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09847/) (2019)
- [TANet: Robust 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds with Triple Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05163/) (2019)
- [FastDepth: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation on Embedded Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03273/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Joint Semantic Segmentation and Depth Estimation Using Asymmetric Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04766/) (2018)
- [Structure-Aware Residual Pyramid Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06023/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Object Detection with Decoupled Structured Polygon Estimation and Height-Guided Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01619/) (2020)
- [Pseudo RGB-D for Self-Improving Monocular SLAM and Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10681/) (2020)
- [Towards Monocular Vision based Obstacle Avoidance through Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09829/) (2017)
- [Pose Graph Optimization for Unsupervised Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06315/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SM4Depth: Seamless Monocular Metric Depth Estimation across Multiple Cameras and Scenes by One Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08556/) (2024)
- [DepthART: Scaling Foundation Monocular Depth to Tiny Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17099/) (2026)
- [LMDepth: Lightweight Mamba-based Monocular Depth Estimation for Real-World Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00980/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The performance of monocular depth estimation generally depends on the amount of parameters and computational cost. It leads to a large accuracy contrast between light-weight networks and heavy-weight networks, which limits their application in the real world. In this paper, we model the majority of accuracy contrast between them as the difference of depth distribution, which we call "Distribution drift". To this end, a distribution alignment network (DANet) is proposed. We firstly design a pyramid scene transformer (PST) module to capture inter-region interaction in multiple scales. By perceiving the difference of depth features between every two regions, DANet tends to predict a reasonable scene structure, which fits the shape of distribution to ground truth. Then, we propose a local-global optimization (LGO) scheme to realize the supervision of global range of scene depth. Thanks to the alignment of depth distribution shape and scene depth range, DANet sharply alleviates the distribution drift, and achieves a comparable performance with prior heavy-weight methods, but uses only 1% floating-point operations per second (FLOPs) of them. The experiments on two datasets, namely the widely used NYUDv2 dataset and the more challenging iBims-1 dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The source code is available at https://github.com/YiLiM1/DANet.