# Can Language Understand Depth?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01077 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01077/

## Key facts

- Cited by 69 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [FCOS3D: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10956/) (2021)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free CLIP-Adapter for Better Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03930/) (2021)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [SMOKE: Single-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection via Keypoint Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10111/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Monocular Video Using 3D Geometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05522/) (2018)
- [DepthFormer: Exploiting Long-Range Correlation and Local Information for Accurate Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14211/) (2022)
- [VT-CLIP: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Visual-guided Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02399/) (2021)
- [Dual-stream Network for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14734/) (2021)
- [PLNet: Plane and Line Priors for Unsupervised Indoor Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05839/) (2021)
- [Inferring Point Clouds from Single Monocular Images by Depth Intermediation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01402/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Learning for Joint Depth and Image Reconstruction from Diffracted Rotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07076/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Prompt, Generate, then Cache: Cascade of Foundation Models makes Strong Few-shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02151/) (2023)
- [SpatialBot: Precise Spatial Understanding with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13642/) (2024)
- [CALIP: Zero-Shot Enhancement of CLIP with Parameter-free Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14169/) (2022)
- [EDA: Explicit Text-Decoupling and Dense Alignment for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14941/) (2022)
- [Binding Touch to Everything: Learning Unified Multimodal Tactile Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18084/) (2024)
- [Not All Features Matter: Enhancing Few-shot CLIP with Adaptive Prior Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01195/) (2023)
- [ViewRefer: Grasp the Multi-view Knowledge for 3D Visual Grounding with GPT and Prototype Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16894/) (2023)
- [Two Effects, One Trigger: On the Modality Gap, Object Bias, and Information Imbalance in Contrastive Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07983/) (2024)
- [Deception Detection from Linguistic and Physiological Data Streams Using Bimodal Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10944/) (2023)
- [PiMAE: Point Cloud and Image Interactive Masked Autoencoders for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08129/) (2023)
- [Dual Modality Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Pre-Trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08340/) (2022)
- [Joint-MAE: 2D-3D Joint Masked Autoencoders for 3D Point Cloud Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14007/) (2023)
- [Dual Prototype Evolving for Test-Time Generalization of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12790/) (2024)
- [TiG-BEV: Multi-view BEV 3D Object Detection via Target Inner-Geometry Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13979/) (2022)
- [Parameter is Not All You Need: Starting from Non-Parametric Networks for 3D Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08134/) (2023)
- [EventBind: Learning a Unified Representation to Bind Them All for Event-based Open-world Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03135/) (2023)
- [WorDepth: Variational Language Prior for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03635/) (2024)
- [LidarCLIP or: How I Learned to Talk to Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06858/) (2022)
- [Transfer CLIP for Generalizable Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15132/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Learning to Adapt CLIP for Few-Shot Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01034/) (2023)
- [Enhance Image-to-Image Generation with LLaVA-generated Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01956/) (2024)
- [Teach CLIP to Develop a Number Sense for Ordinal Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03574/) (2024)
- [Harnessing LLMs for API Interactions: A Framework for Classification and Synthetic Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11703/) (2024)
- [CLIPose: Category-Level Object Pose Estimation with Pre-trained Vision-Language Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15726/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Modern Approaches in 3D Scene Reconstruction: NeRF vs Gaussian-Based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04268/) (2024)
- [Vision-Language Embodiment for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16535/) (2025)
- [ScaleDepth: Decomposing Metric Depth Estimation into Scale Prediction and Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08187/) (2024)
- [NEVLP: Noise-Robust Framework for Efficient Vision-Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09582/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Besides image classification, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has accomplished extraordinary success for a wide range of vision tasks, including object-level and 3D space understanding. However, it's still challenging to transfer semantic knowledge learned from CLIP into more intricate tasks of quantified targets, such as depth estimation with geometric information. In this paper, we propose to apply CLIP for zero-shot monocular depth estimation, named DepthCLIP. We found that the patches of the input image could respond to a certain semantic distance token and then be projected to a quantified depth bin for coarse estimation. Without any training, our DepthCLIP surpasses existing unsupervised methods and even approaches the early fully-supervised networks. To our best knowledge, we are the first to conduct zero-shot adaptation from the semantic language knowledge to quantified downstream tasks and perform zero-shot monocular depth estimation. We hope our work could cast a light on future research. The code is available at https://github.com/Adonis-galaxy/DepthCLIP.