# Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation by Direction-aware Cumulative Convolution Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05605/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04992/) (2016)
- [Competitive Collaboration: Joint Unsupervised Learning of Depth, Camera Motion, Optical Flow and Motion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09806/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Representations for Labeling Pixels and Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04514/) (2019)
- [DeMoN: Depth and Motion Network for Learning Monocular Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02401/) (2016)
- [The Temporal Opportunist: Self-Supervised Multi-Frame Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14540/) (2021)
- [On the uncertainty of self-supervised monocular depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06209/) (2020)
- [Depth from Videos in the Wild: Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning from Unknown Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04998/) (2019)
- [DF-Net: Unsupervised Joint Learning of Depth and Flow using Cross-Task Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01649/) (2018)
- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Learning with Geometric Constraints in Monocular Video: Connecting Flow, Depth, and Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05820/) (2019)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Hints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09051/) (2019)
- [A Review on Deep Learning Techniques Applied to Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06857/) (2017)
- [HR-Depth: High Resolution Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07356/) (2020)
- [P3Depth: Monocular Depth Estimation with a Piecewise Planarity Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02091/) (2022)
- [Boosting Monocular Depth Estimation Models to High-Resolution via Content-Adaptive Multi-Resolution Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14021/) (2021)
- [Lite-Mono: A Lightweight CNN and Transformer Architecture for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13202/) (2022)
- [UnDeepVO: Monocular Visual Odometry through Unsupervised Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06841/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Techniques for Stereo-based Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02535/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Learning in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16404/) (2020)
- [How do neural networks see depth in single images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07005/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [IS-Fusion: Instance-Scene Collaborative Fusion for Multimodal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15241/) (2024)
- [Jasmine: Harnessing Diffusion Prior for Self-supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15905/) (2025)
- [DCPI-Depth: Explicitly Infusing Dense Correspondence Prior to Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16960/) (2024)
- [Mono-ViFI: A Unified Learning Framework for Self-supervised Single- and Multi-frame Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14126/) (2024)
- [FisheyeDepth: A Real Scale Self-Supervised Depth Estimation Model for Fisheye Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15054/) (2024)
- [Mining Supervision for Dynamic Regions in Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14908/) (2024)
- [High-Precision Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Rich-Resource Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00361/) (2024)
- [NimbleD: Enhancing Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Pseudo-labels and Large-scale Video Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14177/) (2024)
- [Learning to Efficiently Adapt Foundation Models for Self-Supervised Endoscopic 3D Scene Reconstruction from Any Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15917/) (2025)
- [Depth3DLane: Monocular 3D Lane Detection via Depth Prior Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18325/) (2025)
- [TR2M: Transferring Monocular Relative Depth to Metric Depth with Language Descriptions and Dual-Level Scale-Oriented Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13387/) (2025)
- [Endoscopic Depth Estimation Based on Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20881/) (2025)
- [JEPADepth: Masked Predictive Representation Learning for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26600/) (2026)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation from a Single Image: Progress and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01172/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation is known as an ill-posed task in which objects in a 2D image usually do not contain sufficient information to predict their depth. Thus, it acts differently from other tasks (e.g., classification and segmentation) in many ways. In this paper, we find that self-supervised monocular depth estimation shows a direction sensitivity and environmental dependency in the feature representation. But the current backbones borrowed from other tasks pay less attention to handling different types of environmental information, limiting the overall depth accuracy. To bridge this gap, we propose a new Direction-aware Cumulative Convolution Network (DaCCN), which improves the depth feature representation in two aspects. First, we propose a direction-aware module, which can learn to adjust the feature extraction in each direction, facilitating the encoding of different types of information. Secondly, we design a new cumulative convolution to improve the efficiency for aggregating important environmental information. Experiments show that our method achieves significant improvements on three widely used benchmarks, KITTI, Cityscapes, and Make3D, setting a new state-of-the-art performance on the popular benchmarks with all three types of self-supervision.