# IEBins: Iterative Elastic Bins for Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14137 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14137/

## Key facts

- Cited by 54 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [ORB-SLAM2: an Open-Source SLAM System for Monocular, Stereo and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06475/) (2016)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [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)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)
- [Enforcing geometric constraints of virtual normal for depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12209/) (2019)
- [BinsFormer: Revisiting Adaptive Bins for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00987/) (2022)
- [Conformer: Local Features Coupling Global Representations for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03889/) (2021)
- [NeW CRFs: Neural Window Fully-connected CRFs for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01502/) (2022)
- [Transformer-Based Attention Networks for Continuous Pixel-Wise Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12091/) (2021)
- [RAFT-3D: Scene Flow using Rigid-Motion Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00726/) (2020)
- [Revealing the Dark Secrets of Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13543/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Trained Depth Estimation using Self-attention and Discrete Disparity Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13951/) (2020)
- [P3Depth: Monocular Depth Estimation with a Piecewise Planarity Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02091/) (2022)
- [ViP-DeepLab: Learning Visual Perception with Depth-aware Video Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05258/) (2020)
- [LocalBins: Improving Depth Estimation by Learning Local Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15132/) (2022)
- [Attention Attention Everywhere: Monocular Depth Prediction with Skip Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09071/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [ECoDepth: Effective Conditioning of Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18807/) (2024)
- [AutoReproduce: Automatic AI Experiment Reproduction with Paper Lineage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20662/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Metric Depth with a Field-of-View Conditioned Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13252/) (2023)
- [Atlantis: Enabling Underwater Depth Estimation with Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12471/) (2023)
- [Jasmine: Harnessing Diffusion Prior for Self-supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15905/) (2025)
- [Toward Real-world BEV Perception: Depth Uncertainty Estimation via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01957/) (2025)
- [ScaleDepth: Decomposing Metric Depth Estimation into Scale Prediction and Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08187/) (2024)
- [HazyDet: Open-Source Benchmark for Drone-View Object Detection with Depth-Cues in Hazy Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19833/) (2024)
- [DCPI-Depth: Explicitly Infusing Dense Correspondence Prior to Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16960/) (2024)
- [DCDepth: Progressive Monocular Depth Estimation in Discrete Cosine Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14980/) (2024)
- [Scalable Autoregressive Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11361/) (2024)
- [EvTexture: Event-driven Texture Enhancement for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13457/) (2024)
- [Metric-Solver: Sliding Anchored Metric Depth Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12103/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Ordinal Regression: Applications, Advances and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00952/) (2025)
- [EgoDTM: Towards 3D-Aware Egocentric Video-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15470/) (2025)
- [MonoTher-Depth: Enhancing Thermal Depth Estimation via Confidence-Aware Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16127/) (2025)
- [IDESplat: Iterative Depth Probability Estimation for Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03824/) (2026)
- [Plane2Depth: Hierarchical Adaptive Plane Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02494/) (2024)
- [ER-LoRA: Effective-Rank Guided Adaptation for Weather-Generalized Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00665/) (2025)
- [UniCT Depth: Event-Image Fusion Based Monocular Depth Estimation with Convolution-Compensated ViT Dual SA Block](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19948/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Stereo Depth Estimation with Multi-Spectral Images Across All Lighting Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03638/) (2024)
- [FUSE: Label-Free Image-Event Joint Monocular Depth Estimation via Frequency-Decoupled Alignment and Degradation-Robust Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19739/) (2025)
- [ViT-Split: Unleashing the Power of Vision Foundation Models via Efficient Splitting Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03433/) (2025)
- [Towards Depth Foundation Model: Recent Trends in Vision-Based Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11540/) (2025)
- [Less is More: Pseudo-Label Filtering for Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02609/) (2024)
- [TRIDE: A Text-assisted Radar-Image weather-aware fusion network for Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08038/) (2025)
- [ROVR-Open-Dataset: A Large-Scale Depth Dataset for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13977/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is a fundamental topic of geometric computer vision and a core technique for many downstream applications. Recently, several methods reframe the MDE as a classification-regression problem where a linear combination of probabilistic distribution and bin centers is used to predict depth. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of iterative elastic bins (IEBins) for the classification-regression-based MDE. The proposed IEBins aims to search for high-quality depth by progressively optimizing the search range, which involves multiple stages and each stage performs a finer-grained depth search in the target bin on top of its previous stage. To alleviate the possible error accumulation during the iterative process, we utilize a novel elastic target bin to replace the original target bin, the width of which is adjusted elastically based on the depth uncertainty. Furthermore, we develop a dedicated framework composed of a feature extractor and an iterative optimizer that has powerful temporal context modeling capabilities benefiting from the GRU-based architecture. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, NYU-Depth-v2 and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses prior state-of-the-art competitors. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ShuweiShao/IEBins.