# The Devil is in the Edges: Monocular Depth Estimation with Edge-aware Consistency Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00373 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00373/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [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)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06792/) (2020)
- [Learning Blind Video Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00449/) (2018)
- [DIODE: A Dense Indoor and Outdoor DEpth Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00463/) (2019)
- [Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.15021/) (2020)
- [Learning to Recover 3D Scene Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09365/) (2020)
- [Improved Texture Networks: Maximizing Quality and Diversity in Feed-forward Stylization and Texture Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02096/) (2017)
- [3D Photography using Context-aware Layered Depth Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04727/) (2020)
- [DeMoN: Depth and Motion Network for Learning Monocular Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02401/) (2016)
- [On the uncertainty of self-supervised monocular depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06209/) (2020)
- [Pixel Difference Networks for Efficient Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07009/) (2021)
- [Evaluation of CNN-based Single-Image Depth Estimation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01328/) (2018)
- [3D Ken Burns Effect from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05483/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Trained Depth Estimation using Self-attention and Discrete Disparity Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13951/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [AnyDepth: Depth Estimation Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02760/) (2026)
- [Generating Daylight-driven Architectural Design via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13353/) (2024)
- [Improved monocular depth prediction using distance transform over pre-semantic contours with self-supervised neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08320/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel monocular depth estimation method, named ECFNet, for estimating high-quality monocular depth with clear edges and valid overall structure from a single RGB image. We make a thorough inquiry about the key factor that affects the edge depth estimation of the MDE networks, and come to a ratiocination that the edge information itself plays a critical role in predicting depth details. Driven by this analysis, we propose to explicitly employ the image edges as input for ECFNet and fuse the initial depths from different sources to produce the final depth. Specifically, ECFNet first uses a hybrid edge detection strategy to get the edge map and edge-highlighted image from the input image, and then leverages a pre-trained MDE network to infer the initial depths of the aforementioned three images. After that, ECFNet utilizes a layered fusion module (LFM) to fuse the initial depth, which will be further updated by a depth consistency module (DCM) to form the final estimation. Extensive experimental results on public datasets and ablation studies indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zrealli.github.io/edgedepth.