# MonoDINO-DETR: Depth-Enhanced Monocular 3D Object Detection Using a Vision Foundation Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00315 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00315/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Categorical Depth Distribution Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01100/) (2021)
- [M3D-RPN: Monocular 3D Region Proposal Network for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06038/) (2019)
- [Learning Depth-Guided Convolutions for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04799/) (2019)
- [MonoDTR: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Depth-Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10981/) (2022)
- [MonoDETR: Depth-guided Transformer for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13310/) (2022)
- [Depth-conditioned Dynamic Message Propagation for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16470/) (2021)
- [MonoCD: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Complementary Depths](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03181/) (2024)
- [MonoGround: Detecting Monocular 3D Objects from the Ground](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07372/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Unleashing the Power of Chain-of-Prediction for Monocular 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04594/) (2025)
- [A Multi-Modal Perception Pipeline for Object Detection and Tracking in Autonomous Racing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08338/) (2026)
- [OmniAct3D: Leveraging Foundation Geometry and Evidence-Grounded Reasoning for Panoramic 3D Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03015/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes novel methods to enhance the performance of monocular 3D object detection models by leveraging the generalized feature extraction capabilities of a vision foundation model. Unlike traditional CNN-based approaches, which often suffer from inaccurate depth estimation and rely on multi-stage object detection pipelines, this study employs a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based foundation model as the backbone, which excels at capturing global features for depth estimation. It integrates a detection transformer (DETR) architecture to improve both depth estimation and object detection performance in a one-stage manner. Specifically, a hierarchical feature fusion block is introduced to extract richer visual features from the foundation model, further enhancing feature extraction capabilities. Depth estimation accuracy is further improved by incorporating a relative depth estimation model trained on large-scale data and fine-tuning it through transfer learning. Additionally, the use of queries in the transformer's decoder, which consider reference points and the dimensions of 2D bounding boxes, enhances recognition performance. The proposed model outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods, as demonstrated through quantitative and qualitative evaluations on the KITTI 3D benchmark and a custom dataset collected from high-elevation racing environments. Code is available at https://github.com/JihyeokKim/MonoDINO-DETR.