# RSA: Resolving Scale Ambiguities in Monocular Depth Estimators through Language Descriptions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02924 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02924/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 84 of its 100 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (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)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [PointCLIP: Point Cloud Understanding by CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02413/) (2021)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free CLIP-Adapter for Better Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03930/) (2021)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04992/) (2016)
- [Mask DINO: Towards A Unified Transformer-based Framework for Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02777/) (2022)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth and Ego-motion Learning from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10553/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [From Editor to Dense Geometry Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04338/) (2025)
- [Jasmine: Harnessing Diffusion Prior for Self-supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15905/) (2025)
- [Any3D-VLA: Enhancing VLA Robustness via Diverse Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00807/) (2026)
- [ProtoDepth: Unsupervised Continual Depth Completion with Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12745/) (2025)
- [Extending Foundational Monocular Depth Estimators to Fisheye Cameras with Calibration Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04928/) (2025)
- [Hybrid-grained Feature Aggregation with Coarse-to-fine Language Guidance for Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09320/) (2025)
- [Radar-Guided Polynomial Fitting for Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17182/) (2025)
- [ETA: Energy-based Test-time Adaptation for Depth Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05989/) (2025)
- [Region-aware Depth Scale Adaptation with Sparse Measurements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14879/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Exchange Rate Forecasting with Explainable Deep Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19241/) (2024)
- [TR2M: Transferring Monocular Relative Depth to Metric Depth with Language Descriptions and Dual-Level Scale-Oriented Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13387/) (2025)
- [TRIDE: A Text-assisted Radar-Image weather-aware fusion network for Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08038/) (2025)
- [Language as Prior, Vision as Calibration: Metric Scale Recovery for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01457/) (2026)
- [GPA-VGGT:Adapting VGGT to Large Scale Localization by Self-Supervised Learning with Geometry and Physics Aware Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16885/) (2026)
- [Thinking with Novel Views: A Systematic Analysis of Generative-Augmented Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10588/) (2026)
- [Co-SemDepth: Fast Joint Semantic Segmentation and Depth Estimation on Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17982/) (2025)
- [VGLD: Visually-Guided Linguistic Disambiguation for Monocular Depth Scale Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02704/) (2025)
- [VFM-Recon: Unlocking Cross-Domain Scene-Level Neural Reconstruction with Scale-Aligned Foundation Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12657/) (2026)
- [URS-Stereo: Uncertainty-Guided Residual Search for Real-Time Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06779/) (2026)
- [ChainSpace: A Chained-Reasoning Paradigm for Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15788/) (2026)
- [UniMetric: Universal Metric Scale Recovery for Visual Geometry Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16945/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a method for metric-scale monocular depth estimation. Inferring depth from a single image is an ill-posed problem due to the loss of scale from perspective projection during the image formation process. Any scale chosen is a bias, typically stemming from training on a dataset; hence, existing works have instead opted to use relative (normalized, inverse) depth. Our goal is to recover metric-scaled depth maps through a linear transformation. The crux of our method lies in the observation that certain objects (e.g., cars, trees, street signs) are typically found or associated with certain types of scenes (e.g., outdoor). We explore whether language descriptions can be used to transform relative depth predictions to those in metric scale. Our method, RSA, takes as input a text caption describing objects present in an image and outputs the parameters of a linear transformation which can be applied globally to a relative depth map to yield metric-scaled depth predictions. We demonstrate our method on recent general-purpose monocular depth models on indoors (NYUv2, VOID) and outdoors (KITTI). When trained on multiple datasets, RSA can serve as a general alignment module in zero-shot settings. Our method improves over common practices in aligning relative to metric depth and results in predictions that are comparable to an upper bound of fitting relative depth to ground truth via a linear transformation.