# Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Challenging Conditions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09711/

## Key facts

- Cited by 58 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [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)
- [On the uncertainty of self-supervised monocular depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06209/) (2020)
- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [Semantically-Guided Representation Learning for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12319/) (2020)
- [MonoDTR: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Depth-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10981/) (2022)
- [P3Depth: Monocular Depth Estimation with a Piecewise Planarity Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02091/) (2022)
- [Boreas: A Multi-Season Autonomous Driving Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10168/) (2022)
- [Learning monocular depth estimation infusing traditional stereo knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04144/) (2019)
- [Channel-Wise Attention-Based Network for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13047/) (2021)
- [DeFeat-Net: General Monocular Depth via Simultaneous Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13446/) (2020)
- [Regularizing Nighttime Weirdness: Efficient Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03830/) (2021)
- [Ithaca365: Dataset and Driving Perception under Repeated and Challenging Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01166/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for All Day Images using Domain Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07628/) (2021)
- [Full Surround Monodepth from Multiple Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00152/) (2021)
- [R4Dyn: Exploring Radar for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04814/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Night-time Images using Adversarial Domain Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01402/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation: Overcoming Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16698/) (2024)
- [Synthetic-to-Real Self-supervised Robust Depth Estimation via Learning with Motion and Structure Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20211/) (2025)
- [Digging into contrastive learning for robust depth estimation with diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09831/) (2024)
- [WeatherDepth: Curriculum Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Depth Estimation under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05556/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-based Depth Estimation Methods from Monocular Image and Videos: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19675/) (2024)
- [Calib3D: Calibrating Model Preferences for Reliable 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17010/) (2024)
- [The Third Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16831/) (2024)
- [BevSplat: Resolving Height Ambiguity via Feature-Based Gaussian Primitives for Weakly-Supervised Cross-View Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09080/) (2025)
- [The Fourth Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17787/) (2025)
- [Stealing Stable Diffusion Prior for Robust Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05056/) (2024)
- [Dusk Till Dawn: Self-supervised Nighttime Stereo Depth Estimation using Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11158/) (2024)
- [Always Clear Depth: Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12199/) (2025)
- [EC-Depth: Exploring the consistency of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in challenging scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08044/) (2023)
- [RIDERS: Radar-Infrared Depth Estimation for Robust Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02067/) (2024)
- [3D Adversarial Augmentations for Robust Out-of-Domain Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15479/) (2023)
- [When Cars meet Drones: Hyperbolic Federated Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13762/) (2024)
- [Adverse Weather Optical Flow: Cumulative Homogeneous-Heterogeneous Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17001/) (2024)
- [ER-LoRA: Effective-Rank Guided Adaptation for Weather-Generalized Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00665/) (2025)
- [Depth Estimation from a Single Optical Encoded Image using a Learned Colored-Coded Aperture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08033/) (2023)
- [DOC-Depth: A novel approach for dense depth ground truth generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02144/) (2025)
- [EvidMTL: Evidential Multi-Task Learning for Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Surface Mapping from Monocular RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04441/) (2025)
- [From Ideal to Real: Unified and Data-Efficient Dense Prediction for Real-World Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20279/) (2025)
- [HuPrior3R: Incorporating Human Priors for Better 3D Dynamic Reconstruction from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06368/) (2025)
- [NeRFmentation: NeRF-based Augmentation for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03771/) (2024)
- [LED: Light Enhanced Depth Estimation at Night](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08031/) (2024)
- [Structure-Centric Robust Monocular Depth Estimation via Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06982/) (2024)
- [RoSe: Robust Self-supervised Stereo Matching under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19165/) (2025)
- [Learning Depth from Past Selves: Self-Evolution Contrast for Robust Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15167/) (2025)
- [Visual Heading Prediction for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09898/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation approaches achieve impressive results in ideal settings, they are highly unreliable under challenging illumination and weather conditions, such as at nighttime or in the presence of rain. In this paper, we uncover these safety-critical issues and tackle them with md4all: a simple and effective solution that works reliably under both adverse and ideal conditions, as well as for different types of learning supervision. We achieve this by exploiting the efficacy of existing methods under perfect settings. Therefore, we provide valid training signals independently of what is in the input. First, we generate a set of complex samples corresponding to the normal training ones. Then, we train the model by guiding its self- or full-supervision by feeding the generated samples and computing the standard losses on the corresponding original images. Doing so enables a single model to recover information across diverse conditions without modifications at inference time. Extensive experiments on two challenging public datasets, namely nuScenes and Oxford RobotCar, demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques, outperforming prior works by a large margin in both standard and challenging conditions. Source code and data are available at: https://md4all.github.io.