# UMono: Physical Model Informed Hybrid CNN-Transformer Framework for Underwater Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17838 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17838/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [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)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [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)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [Early Convolutions Help Transformers See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14881/) (2021)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [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)
- [DepthFormer: Exploiting Long-Range Correlation and Local Information for Accurate Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14211/) (2022)
- [Lite-Mono: A Lightweight CNN and Transformer Architecture for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13202/) (2022)
- [Atlantis: Enabling Underwater Depth Estimation with Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12471/) (2023)
- [UDepth: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation for Visually-guided Underwater Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12358/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Single Image Underwater Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10595/) (2019)
- [Metrically Scaled Monocular Depth Estimation through Sparse Priors for Underwater Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16750/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Underwater](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03206/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [A Practical Approach to Underwater Depth and Surface Normals Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02072/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater monocular depth estimation serves as the foundation for tasks such as 3D reconstruction of underwater scenes. However, due to the influence of light and medium, the underwater environment undergoes a distinctive imaging process, which presents challenges in accurately estimating depth from a single image. The existing methods fail to consider the unique characteristics of underwater environments, leading to inadequate estimation results and limited generalization performance. Furthermore, underwater depth estimation requires extracting and fusing both local and global features, which is not fully explored in existing methods. In this paper, an end-to-end learning framework for underwater monocular depth estimation called UMono is presented, which incorporates underwater image formation model characteristics into network architecture, and effectively utilize both local and global features of underwater image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for underwater monocular depth estimation and outperforms the existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative analyses.
