# DesNet: Decomposed Scale-Consistent Network for Unsupervised Depth Completion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.10994 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10994/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [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 Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth and Ego-motion Learning from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10553/) (2019)
- [DeepFusion: Lidar-Camera Deep Fusion for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08195/) (2022)
- [Non-Local Spatial Propagation Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10042/) (2020)
- [Pattern-Affinitive Propagation across Depth, Surface Normal and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03525/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Sparse-to-Dense: Self-supervised Depth Completion from LiDAR and Monocular Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00275/) (2018)
- [Feature-metric Loss for Self-supervised Learning of Depth and Egomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10603/) (2020)
- [Learning Depth with Convolutional Spatial Propagation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02695/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Learning with Geometric Constraints in Monocular Video: Connecting Flow, Depth, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05820/) (2019)
- [DeepLiDAR: Deep Surface Normal Guided Depth Prediction for Outdoor Scene from Sparse LiDAR Data and Single Color Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00488/) (2018)
- [Learning Guided Convolutional Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01238/) (2019)
- [In Defense of Classical Image Processing: Fast Depth Completion on the CPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00036/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Depth Completion from Visual Inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08616/) (2019)
- [Towards Better Generalization: Joint Depth-Pose Learning without PoseNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01314/) (2020)
- [RigNet: Repetitive Image Guided Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13802/) (2021)
- [Sparse and noisy LiDAR completion with RGB guidance and uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.05356/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Spatial Propagation Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09769/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Depth Completion with Calibrated Backprojection Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10531/) (2021)
- [Dense Depth Posterior (DDP) from Single Image and Sparse Range](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10034/) (2019)
- [Pseudo RGB-D for Self-Improving Monocular SLAM and Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10681/) (2020)
- [DFuseNet: Deep Fusion of RGB and Sparse Depth Information for Image Guided Dense Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00761/) (2019)
- [Learning Topology from Synthetic Data for Unsupervised Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02994/) (2021)
- [RA-Depth: Resolution Adaptive Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11984/) (2022)

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

- [MonoOcc: Digging into Monocular Semantic Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08766/) (2024)
- [Tri-Perspective View Decomposition for Geometry-Aware Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15008/) (2024)
- [Deep Height Decoupling for Precise Vision-based 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07972/) (2024)
- [AugUndo: Scaling Up Augmentations for Monocular Depth Completion and Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09739/) (2023)
- [Distilling Monocular Foundation Model for Fine-grained Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16970/) (2025)
- [Learnable Differencing Center for Nighttime Depth Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14538/) (2023)
- [DORNet: A Degradation Oriented and Regularized Network for Blind Depth Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11666/) (2024)
- [DCDepth: Progressive Monocular Depth Estimation in Discrete Cosine Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14980/) (2024)
- [Completion as Enhancement: A Degradation-Aware Selective Image Guided Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19225/) (2024)
- [RigNet++: Semantic Assisted Repetitive Image Guided Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00655/) (2023)
- [ProtoDepth: Unsupervised Continual Depth Completion with Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12745/) (2025)
- [Lightweight Full-Convolutional Siamese Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05392/) (2023)
- [All-day Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17315/) (2024)
- [Scene Prior Filtering for Depth Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13876/) (2024)
- [UnCLe: Benchmarking Unsupervised Continual Learning for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18074/) (2024)
- [Event-Driven Dynamic Scene Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13279/) (2025)
- [PacGDC: Label-Efficient Generalizable Depth Completion with Projection Ambiguity and Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07374/) (2025)
- [ETA: Energy-based Test-time Adaptation for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05989/) (2025)
- [Diff-Reg v1: Diffusion Matching Model for Registration Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19919/) (2024)
- [See through the Dark: Learning Illumination-affined Representations for Nighttime Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20641/) (2025)
- [TIE-KD: Teacher-Independent and Explainable Knowledge Distillation for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14340/) (2024)
- [Depth on Demand: Streaming Dense Depth from a Low Frame Rate Active Sensor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08277/) (2024)
- [DA-Occ: Direction-Aware 2D Convolution for Efficient and Geometry-Preserving 3D Occupancy Prediction in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23599/) (2025)
- [StarryGazer: Leveraging Monocular Depth Estimation Models for Domain-Agnostic Single Depth Image Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13147/) (2025)
- [Towards Balanced RGB-TSDF Fusion for Consistent Semantic Scene Completion by 3D RGB Feature Completion and a Classwise Entropy Loss Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16888/) (2024)
- [Training Self-Supervised Depth Completion Using Sparse Measurements and a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14845/) (2025)
- [SwiftNDC: Fast Neural Depth Correction for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22565/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised depth completion aims to recover dense depth from the sparse one without using the ground-truth annotation. Although depth measurement obtained from LiDAR is usually sparse, it contains valid and real distance information, i.e., scale-consistent absolute depth values. Meanwhile, scale-agnostic counterparts seek to estimate relative depth and have achieved impressive performance. To leverage both the inherent characteristics, we thus suggest to model scale-consistent depth upon unsupervised scale-agnostic frameworks. Specifically, we propose the decomposed scale-consistent learning (DSCL) strategy, which disintegrates the absolute depth into relative depth prediction and global scale estimation, contributing to individual learning benefits. But unfortunately, most existing unsupervised scale-agnostic frameworks heavily suffer from depth holes due to the extremely sparse depth input and weak supervised signal. To tackle this issue, we introduce the global depth guidance (GDG) module, which attentively propagates dense depth reference into the sparse target via novel dense-to-sparse attention. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our method on outdoor KITTI benchmark, ranking 1st and outperforming the best KBNet more than 12% in RMSE. In addition, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on indoor NYUv2 dataset.