# Monocular Visual-Inertial Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12134 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12134/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [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)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05065/) (2017)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15021/) (2020)
- [Non-Local Spatial Propagation Network for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10042/) (2020)
- [Robust Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05901/) (2020)
- [DeepV2D: Video to Depth with Differentiable Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04605/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Depth Completion from Visual Inertial Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08616/) (2019)
- [Don't Forget The Past: Recurrent Depth Estimation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02613/) (2020)
- [Neural RGB->D Sensing: Depth and Uncertainty from a Video Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02571/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Depth Completion with Calibrated Backprojection Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10531/) (2021)
- [Geo-Supervised Visual Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11130/) (2018)
- [SelfVIO: Self-Supervised Deep Monocular Visual-Inertial Odometry and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09968/) (2019)
- [Video Depth Estimation by Fusing Flow-to-Depth Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12874/) (2019)
- [Deep Depth Estimation from Visual-Inertial SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00092/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [MiDaS v3.1 -- A Model Zoo for Robust Monocular Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14460/) (2023)
- [Deep Patch Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01654/) (2024)
- [RadarCam-Depth: Radar-Camera Fusion for Depth Estimation with Learned Metric Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04325/) (2024)
- [SuperPrimitive: Scene Reconstruction at a Primitive Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05889/) (2023)
- [HybridDepth: Robust Metric Depth Fusion by Leveraging Depth from Focus and Single-Image Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18443/) (2024)
- [NeRF-VO: Real-Time Sparse Visual Odometry with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13471/) (2023)
- [A Simple yet Effective Test-Time Adaptation for Zero-Shot Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14103/) (2024)
- [RIDERS: Radar-Infrared Depth Estimation for Robust Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02067/) (2024)
- [PacGDC: Label-Efficient Generalizable Depth Completion with Projection Ambiguity and Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07374/) (2025)
- [RaCalNet: Radar Calibration Network for Sparse-Supervised Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15560/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Metric Depth Estimation via Monocular Visual-Inertial Rescaling for Autonomous Aerial Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08159/) (2025)
- [SPADE: Sparsity Adaptive Depth Estimator for Zero-Shot, Real-Time, Monocular Depth Estimation in Underwater Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25463/) (2025)
- [The Multipath Blind Spot: K-Agnostic Robust Calibration for Sparse-Anchor Metric Depth from Frozen Foundations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04101/) (2026)
- [Survey on Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11841/) (2025)
- [VGLD: Visually-Guided Linguistic Disambiguation for Monocular Depth Scale Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02704/) (2025)
- [VIMD: Monocular Visual-Inertial Motion and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19713/) (2025)
- [PTC-Depth: Pose-Refined Monocular Depth Estimation with Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01791/) (2026)
- [GAUGE: Group-Wise View-Inconsistency Rectification for Feed-Forward 4D Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32596/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a visual-inertial depth estimation pipeline that integrates monocular depth estimation and visual-inertial odometry to produce dense depth estimates with metric scale. Our approach performs global scale and shift alignment against sparse metric depth, followed by learning-based dense alignment. We evaluate on the TartanAir and VOID datasets, observing up to 30% reduction in inverse RMSE with dense scale alignment relative to performing just global alignment alone. Our approach is especially competitive at low density; with just 150 sparse metric depth points, our dense-to-dense depth alignment method achieves over 50% lower iRMSE over sparse-to-dense depth completion by KBNet, currently the state of the art on VOID. We demonstrate successful zero-shot transfer from synthetic TartanAir to real-world VOID data and perform generalization tests on NYUv2 and VCU-RVI. Our approach is modular and is compatible with a variety of monocular depth estimation models. Video: https://youtu.be/IMwiKwSpshQ Code: https://github.com/isl-org/VI-Depth