# LED: Light Enhanced Depth Estimation at Night

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08031 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08031/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [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)
- [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)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [GeoNet: Unsupervised Learning of Dense Depth, Optical Flow and Camera Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02276/) (2018)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth and Ego-motion Learning from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10553/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Single Image Depth Estimation: Toward Higher Resolution Maps with Accurate Object Boundaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08673/) (2018)
- [Feature-metric Loss for Self-supervised Learning of Depth and Egomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10603/) (2020)
- [DepthFormer: Exploiting Long-Range Correlation and Local Information for Accurate Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14211/) (2022)
- [Attention Attention Everywhere: Monocular Depth Prediction with Skip Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09071/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Challenging Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09711/) (2023)
- [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)
- [A Benchmark for Lidar Sensors in Fog: Is Detection Breaking Down?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03251/) (2019)
- [Towards real-time unsupervised monocular depth estimation on CPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.11430/) (2018)
- [Benchmarking Image Sensors Under Adverse Weather Conditions for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03238/) (2019)
- [Polka Lines: Learning Structured Illumination and Reconstruction for Active Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13117/) (2020)
- [Deep Hyperspectral-Depth Reconstruction Using Single Color-Dot Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03929/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DOC-Depth: A novel approach for dense depth ground truth generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02144/) (2025)
- [LiDAS: Lighting-driven Dynamic Active Sensing for Nighttime Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08912/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Nighttime camera-based depth estimation is a highly challenging task, especially for autonomous driving applications, where accurate depth perception is essential for ensuring safe navigation. Models trained on daytime data often fail in the absence of precise but costly LiDAR. Even vision foundation models trained on large amounts of data are unreliable in low-light conditions. In this work, we aim to improve the reliability of perception systems at night time. To this end, we introduce Light Enhanced Depth (LED), a novel, cost-effective approach that significantly improves depth estimation in low-light environments by harnessing a pattern projected by high definition headlights available in modern vehicles. LED leads to significant performance boosts across multiple depth-estimation architectures (encoder-decoder, Adabins, DepthFormer, Depth Anything V2) both on synthetic and real datasets. Furthermore, increased performances beyond illuminated areas reveal a holistic enhancement in scene understanding. Finally, we release the Nighttime Synthetic Drive Dataset, a synthetic and photo-realistic nighttime dataset, which comprises 49,990 comprehensively annotated images.