# Self-Distilled Depth Refinement with Noisy Poisson Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17880 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17880/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [DeepMVS: Learning Multi-view Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00650/) (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)
- [Evaluation of CNN-based Single-Image Depth Estimation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01328/) (2018)
- [SMD-Nets: Stereo Mixture Density Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03866/) (2021)
- [Boosting Monocular Depth Estimation Models to High-Resolution via Content-Adaptive Multi-Resolution Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14021/) (2021)
- [Web Stereo Video Supervision for Depth Prediction from Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11112/) (2019)
- [BokehMe: When Neural Rendering Meets Classical Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12614/) (2022)
- [PatchFusion: An End-to-End Tile-Based Framework for High-Resolution Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02284/) (2023)
- [Holopix50k: A Large-Scale In-the-wild Stereo Image Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11172/) (2020)
- [Learning Graph Regularisation for Guided Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14297/) (2022)
- [MPIB: An MPI-Based Bokeh Rendering Framework for Realistic Partial Occlusion Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08403/) (2022)
- [Consistent Direct Time-of-Flight Video Depth Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08658/) (2022)
- [Stereo Matching by Self-supervision of Multiscopic Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04170/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [TacoDepth: Towards Efficient Radar-Camera Depth Estimation with One-stage Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11773/) (2025)
- [One Look is Enough: Seamless Patchwise Refinement for Zero-Shot Monocular Depth Estimation on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22351/) (2025)
- [Any Resolution Any Geometry: From Multi-View To Multi-Patch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03026/) (2026)
- [Spectral-Geometric Neural Fields for Pose-Free LiDAR View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12903/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Depth refinement aims to infer high-resolution depth with fine-grained edges and details, refining low-resolution results of depth estimation models. The prevailing methods adopt tile-based manners by merging numerous patches, which lacks efficiency and produces inconsistency. Besides, prior arts suffer from fuzzy depth boundaries and limited generalizability. Analyzing the fundamental reasons for these limitations, we model depth refinement as a noisy Poisson fusion problem with local inconsistency and edge deformation noises. We propose the Self-distilled Depth Refinement (SDDR) framework to enforce robustness against the noises, which mainly consists of depth edge representation and edge-based guidance. With noisy depth predictions as input, SDDR generates low-noise depth edge representations as pseudo-labels by coarse-to-fine self-distillation. Edge-based guidance with edge-guided gradient loss and edge-based fusion loss serves as the optimization objective equivalent to Poisson fusion. When depth maps are better refined, the labels also become more noise-free. Our model can acquire strong robustness to the noises, achieving significant improvements in accuracy, edge quality, efficiency, and generalizability on five different benchmarks. Moreover, directly training another model with edge labels produced by SDDR brings improvements, suggesting that our method could help with training robust refinement models in future works.