# LocalBins: Improving Depth Estimation by Learning Local Distributions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15132 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15132/

## Key facts

- Cited by 94 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [The Temporal Opportunist: Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14540/) (2021)
- [Depth from Videos in the Wild: Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning from Unknown Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04998/) (2019)
- [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)
- [High Quality Monocular Depth Estimation via Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.11941/) (2018)
- [CrDoCo: Pixel-level Domain Transfer with Cross-Domain Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03182/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16404/) (2020)
- [Guiding Monocular Depth Estimation Using Depth-Attention Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02760/) (2020)
- [Structured Attention Guided Convolutional Neural Fields for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11029/) (2018)
- [Deep3D: Fully Automatic 2D-to-3D Video Conversion with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03650/) (2016)
- [Multi-Scale Continuous CRFs as Sequential Deep Networks for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02157/) (2017)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Internal Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09482/) (2021)
- [Geometry-Aware Symmetric Domain Adaptation for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01870/) (2019)
- [SharpNet: Fast and Accurate Recovery of Occluding Contours in Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08598/) (2019)
- [Global-Local Path Networks for Monocular Depth Estimation with Vertical CutDepth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07436/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth and Ego-motion Learning with Structure and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05717/) (2019)
- [Structure-Aware Residual Pyramid Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06023/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 94)

- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [MiDaS v3.1 -- A Model Zoo for Robust Monocular Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14460/) (2023)
- [DepthFM: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13788/) (2024)
- [Prompting Depth Anything for 4K Resolution Accurate Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14015/) (2024)
- [iDisc: Internal Discretization for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06334/) (2023)
- [IEBins: Iterative Elastic Bins for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14137/) (2023)
- [All in Tokens: Unifying Output Space of Visual Tasks via Soft Token](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02229/) (2023)
- [ECoDepth: Effective Conditioning of Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18807/) (2024)
- [EndoDAC: Efficient Adapting Foundation Model for Self-Supervised Depth Estimation from Any Endoscopic Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08672/) (2024)
- [PlaneDepth: Self-supervised Depth Estimation via Orthogonal Planes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01612/) (2022)
- [FreeReg: Image-to-Point Cloud Registration Leveraging Pretrained Diffusion Models and Monocular Depth Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03420/) (2023)
- [Prompting Diffusion Representations for Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02138/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Metric Depth with a Field-of-View Conditioned Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13252/) (2023)
- [DepthLab: From Partial to Complete](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18153/) (2024)
- [Kick Back & Relax: Learning to Reconstruct the World by Watching SlowTV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10713/) (2023)
- [Multi-view Reconstruction via SfM-guided Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14483/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Through Depth-Guided Feature Correlation and Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12378/) (2023)
- [DepthMaster: Taming Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02576/) (2025)
- [ScaleDepth: Decomposing Metric Depth Estimation into Scale Prediction and Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08187/) (2024)
- [PolyMaX: General Dense Prediction with Mask Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05770/) (2023)
- [EVP: Enhanced Visual Perception using Inverse Multi-Attentive Feature Refinement and Regularized Image-Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08548/) (2023)
- [The Second Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07051/) (2023)
- [Know Your Neighbors: Improving Single-View Reconstruction via Spatial Vision-Language Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03658/) (2024)
- [EndoOmni: Zero-Shot Cross-Dataset Depth Estimation in Endoscopy by Robust Self-Learning from Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05442/) (2024)
- [DCDepth: Progressive Monocular Depth Estimation in Discrete Cosine Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14980/) (2024)
- [HybridDepth: Robust Metric Depth Fusion by Leveraging Depth from Focus and Single-Image Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18443/) (2024)
- [SfM-TTR: Using Structure from Motion for Test-Time Refinement of Single-View Depth Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13551/) (2022)
- [The Third Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16831/) (2024)
- [MetricAnything: Scaling Metric Depth Pretraining with Noisy Heterogeneous Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22054/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a novel architecture for depth estimation from a single image. The architecture itself is based on the popular encoder-decoder architecture that is frequently used as a starting point for all dense regression tasks. We build on AdaBins which estimates a global distribution of depth values for the input image and evolve the architecture in two ways. First, instead of predicting global depth distributions, we predict depth distributions of local neighborhoods at every pixel. Second, instead of predicting depth distributions only towards the end of the decoder, we involve all layers of the decoder. We call this new architecture LocalBins. Our results demonstrate a clear improvement over the state-of-the-art in all metrics on the NYU-Depth V2 dataset. Code and pretrained models will be made publicly available.