# Dusk Till Dawn: Self-supervised Nighttime Stereo Depth Estimation using Visual Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.11158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11158/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04992/) (2016)
- [Deep ViT Features as Dense Visual Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05814/) (2021)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [Practical Stereo Matching via Cascaded Recurrent Network with Adaptive Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11483/) (2022)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [Spreading vectors for similarity search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03198/) (2018)
- [DeFeat-Net: General Monocular Depth via Simultaneous Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13446/) (2020)
- [Accurate and Efficient Stereo Matching via Attention Concatenation Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12699/) (2022)
- [Regularizing Nighttime Weirdness: Efficient Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03830/) (2021)
- [Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09711/) (2023)
- [Excavating the Potential Capacity of Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12484/) (2021)
- [Disentangling Object Motion and Occlusion for Unsupervised Multi-frame Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15174/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for All Day Images using Domain Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07628/) (2021)
- [STEPS: Joint Self-supervised Nighttime Image Enhancement and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01334/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Night-time Images using Adversarial Domain Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01402/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation: Let's Talk About The Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08357/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation in Highly Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13137/) (2021)
- [When the Sun Goes Down: Repairing Photometric Losses for All-Day Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13850/) (2022)
- [DevNet: Self-supervised Monocular Depth Learning via Density Volume Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06351/) (2022)
- [SQLdepth: Generalizable Self-Supervised Fine-Structured Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00526/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Hybrid-grained Feature Aggregation with Coarse-to-fine Language Guidance for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09320/) (2025)
- [MonoTher-Depth: Enhancing Thermal Depth Estimation via Confidence-Aware Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16127/) (2025)
- [RoSe: Robust Self-supervised Stereo Matching under Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19165/) (2025)
- [RGB-Thermal Infrared Fusion for Robust Depth Estimation in Complex Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04821/) (2025)
- [Boosting Omnidirectional Stereo Matching with a Pre-trained Depth Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23502/) (2025)
- [PhysDepth: Plug-and-Play Physical Refinement for Monocular Depth Estimation in Challenging Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04666/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised depth estimation algorithms rely heavily on frame-warping relationships, exhibiting substantial performance degradation when applied in challenging circumstances, such as low-visibility and nighttime scenarios with varying illumination conditions. Addressing this challenge, we introduce an algorithm designed to achieve accurate self-supervised stereo depth estimation focusing on nighttime conditions. Specifically, we use pretrained visual foundation models to extract generalised features across challenging scenes and present an efficient method for matching and integrating these features from stereo frames. Moreover, to prevent pixels violating photometric consistency assumption from negatively affecting the depth predictions, we propose a novel masking approach designed to filter out such pixels. Lastly, addressing weaknesses in the evaluation of current depth estimation algorithms, we present novel evaluation metrics. Our experiments, conducted on challenging datasets including Oxford RobotCar and Multi-Spectral Stereo, demonstrate the robust improvements realized by our approach. Code is available at: https://github.com/madhubabuv/dtd