# DaRF: Boosting Radiance Fields from Sparse Inputs with Monocular Depth Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19201 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19201/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Nerfies: Deformable Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12948/) (2020)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [K-Planes: Explicit Radiance Fields in Space, Time, and Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10241/) (2023)
- [Depth-supervised NeRF: Fewer Views and Faster Training for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02791/) (2021)
- [Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05263/) (2022)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [KiloNeRF: Speeding up Neural Radiance Fields with Thousands of Tiny MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13744/) (2021)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [DNGaussian: Optimizing Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Radiance Fields with Global-Local Depth Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06912/) (2024)
- [CoR-GS: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting via Co-Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12110/) (2024)
- [GaussianObject: High-Quality 3D Object Reconstruction from Four Views with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10259/) (2024)
- [Binocular-Guided 3D Gaussian Splatting with View Consistency for Sparse View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18822/) (2024)
- [Relaxing Accurate Initialization Constraint for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09413/) (2024)
- [MVPGS: Excavating Multi-view Priors for Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Input Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14316/) (2024)
- [FrugalNeRF: Fast Convergence for Extreme Few-shot Novel View Synthesis without Learned Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16271/) (2024)
- [Relative Pose Estimation through Affine Corrections of Monocular Depth Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05446/) (2025)
- [MonoInstance: Enhancing Monocular Priors via Multi-view Instance Alignment for Neural Rendering and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18363/) (2025)
- [Semantically-aware Neural Radiance Fields for Visual Scene Understanding: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11141/) (2024)
- [How to Use Diffusion Priors under Sparse Views?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02225/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-guided Optimal Transport in Depth Supervised Sparse-View 3D Gaussian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19657/) (2024)
- [AIM 2024 Sparse Neural Rendering Challenge: Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15041/) (2024)
- [Fin3R: Fine-tuning Feed-forward 3D Reconstruction Models via Monocular Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22429/) (2025)
- [G3DR: Generative 3D Reconstruction in ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00939/) (2024)
- [SAID-NeRF: Segmentation-AIDed NeRF for Depth Completion of Transparent Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19607/) (2024)
- [Sparse-View 3D Reconstruction: Recent Advances and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16406/) (2025)
- [UFV-Splatter: Pose-Free Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting Adapted to Unfavorable Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22342/) (2025)
- [ProvNeRF: Modeling per Point Provenance in NeRFs as a Stochastic Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08140/) (2024)
- [D2GS: Dense Depth Regularization for LiDAR-free Urban Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25173/) (2025)
- [Depth-guided NeRF Training via Earth Mover's Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13206/) (2024)
- [Disentangled Generation and Aggregation for Robust Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15715/) (2024)
- [DET-GS: Depth- and Edge-Aware Regularization for High-Fidelity 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04099/) (2025)
- [RDG-GS: Relative Depth Guidance with Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Sparse-View 3D Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11102/) (2025)
- [StarryGazer: Leveraging Monocular Depth Estimation Models for Domain-Agnostic Single Depth Image Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13147/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) shows powerful performance in novel view synthesis and 3D geometry reconstruction, but it suffers from critical performance degradation when the number of known viewpoints is drastically reduced. Existing works attempt to overcome this problem by employing external priors, but their success is limited to certain types of scenes or datasets. Employing monocular depth estimation (MDE) networks, pretrained on large-scale RGB-D datasets, with powerful generalization capability would be a key to solving this problem: however, using MDE in conjunction with NeRF comes with a new set of challenges due to various ambiguity problems exhibited by monocular depths. In this light, we propose a novel framework, dubbed D"aRF, that achieves robust NeRF reconstruction with a handful of real-world images by combining the strengths of NeRF and monocular depth estimation through online complementary training. Our framework imposes the MDE network's powerful geometry prior to NeRF representation at both seen and unseen viewpoints to enhance its robustness and coherence. In addition, we overcome the ambiguity problems of monocular depths through patch-wise scale-shift fitting and geometry distillation, which adapts the MDE network to produce depths aligned accurately with NeRF geometry. Experiments show our framework achieves state-of-the-art results both quantitatively and qualitatively, demonstrating consistent and reliable performance in both indoor and outdoor real-world datasets. Project page is available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/DaRF/.