# DepthMaster: Taming Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02576 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02576/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 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 68 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2025.

## 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 68)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (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 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)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Representation Alignment for Generation: Training Diffusion Transformers Is Easier Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06940/) (2024)
- [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)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03011/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Aether: Geometric-Aware Unified World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18945/) (2025)
- [Pixel-Perfect Depth with Semantics-Prompted Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07316/) (2025)
- [ObjectGS: Object-aware Scene Reconstruction and Scene Understanding via Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15454/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything at Any Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01634/) (2025)
- [Light of Normals: Unified Feature Representation for Universal Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18882/) (2025)
- [DiSA: Diffusion Step Annealing in Autoregressive Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20297/) (2025)
- [DVD: Deterministic Video Depth Estimation with Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12250/) (2026)
- [Repurposing Marigold for Zero-Shot Metric Depth Estimation via Defocus Blur Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17358/) (2025)
- [MotionCrafter: Dense Geometry and Motion Reconstruction with a 4D VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08961/) (2026)
- [Depth Anything in 360^circ: Towards Scale Invariance in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22819/) (2025)
- [Pixel-Perfect Visual Geometry Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05246/) (2026)
- [The Midas Touch for Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11578/) (2026)
- [VGLD: Visually-Guided Linguistic Disambiguation for Monocular Depth Scale Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02704/) (2025)
- [MUSE: Unlocking Timestep as Native Task Steering for One-Step Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30370/) (2026)
- [ARDepth: Auto-regressive Monocular Depth Estimation with Progressive Visual Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12433/) (2026)
- [DAPM: UAV Monocular Depth Estimation from Any Height, Pitch, Roll and FOV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21438/) (2026)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation from a Single Image: Progress and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01172/) (2026)
- [TransNormal-2: Geometry-Grounded Rectified Flow with Edge-Aware Decoding for Precise Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06665/) (2026)
- [The Midas Touch for Metric Depth: Interpretable Metricization for Generalizable Depth Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16749/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation within the diffusion-denoising paradigm demonstrates impressive generalization ability but suffers from low inference speed. Recent methods adopt a single-step deterministic paradigm to improve inference efficiency while maintaining comparable performance. However, they overlook the gap between generative and discriminative features, leading to suboptimal results. In this work, we propose DepthMaster, a single-step diffusion model designed to adapt generative features for the discriminative depth estimation task. First, to mitigate overfitting to texture details introduced by generative features, we propose a Feature Alignment module, which incorporates high-quality semantic features to enhance the denoising network's representation capability. Second, to address the lack of fine-grained details in the single-step deterministic framework, we propose a Fourier Enhancement module to adaptively balance low-frequency structure and high-frequency details. We adopt a two-stage training strategy to fully leverage the potential of the two modules. In the first stage, we focus on learning the global scene structure with the Feature Alignment module, while in the second stage, we exploit the Fourier Enhancement module to improve the visual quality. Through these efforts, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of generalization and detail preservation, outperforming other diffusion-based methods across various datasets. Our project page can be found at https://indu1ge.github.io/DepthMaster_page.