# FiffDepth: Feed-forward Transformation of Diffusion-Based Generators for Detailed Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00671/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 51 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [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 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)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15347/) (2023)
- [GeoWizard: Unleashing the Diffusion Priors for 3D Geometry Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12013/) (2024)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [SparseNeRF: Distilling Depth Ranking for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16196/) (2023)
- [DIODE: A Dense Indoor and Outdoor DEpth Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00463/) (2019)
- [Learning to Recover 3D Scene Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09365/) (2020)
- [Robust Consistent Video Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05901/) (2020)
- [DeepV2D: Video to Depth with Differentiable Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04605/) (2018)
- [Single-Image Depth Perception in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03901/) (2016)
- [Spring: A High-Resolution High-Detail Dataset and Benchmark for Scene Flow, Optical Flow and Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01943/) (2023)
- [Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18124/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Pixel-Perfect Depth with Semantics-Prompted Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07316/) (2025)
- [GeoVideo: Introducing Geometric Regularization into Video Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03453/) (2025)
- [Pixel-Perfect Visual Geometry Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05246/) (2026)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via a Self-Supervised Semantic Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16664/) (2026)
- [Iris: Bringing Real-World Priors into Diffusion Model for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16340/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is a fundamental 3D vision problem with numerous applications such as 3D scene reconstruction, autonomous navigation, and AI content creation. However, robust and generalizable MDE remains challenging due to limited real-world labeled data and distribution gaps between synthetic datasets and real data. Existing methods often struggle with real-world test data with low efficiency, reduced accuracy, and lack of detail. To address these issues, we propose an efficient MDE approach named FiffDepth. The key feature of FiffDepth is its use of diffusion priors. It transforms diffusion-based image generators into a feed-forward architecture for detailed depth estimation. FiffDepth preserves key generative features and integrates the strong generalization capabilities of models like DINOv2. Through benchmark evaluations, we demonstrate that FiffDepth achieves exceptional accuracy, stability, and fine-grained detail, offering significant improvements in MDE performance against state-of-the-art MDE approaches. The paper's source code is available here: https://yunpeng1998.github.io/FiffDepth/