# Distill Any Depth: Distillation Creates a Stronger Monocular Depth Estimator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19204 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19204/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (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)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [MoGe: Unlocking Accurate Monocular Geometry Estimation for Open-Domain Images with Optimal Training Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19115/) (2024)
- [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)
- [D3VO: Deep Depth, Deep Pose and Deep Uncertainty for Monocular Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01060/) (2020)
- [MiDaS v3.1 -- A Model Zoo for Robust Monocular Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14460/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [SSR: Enhancing Depth Perception in Vision-Language Models via Rationale-Guided Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12448/) (2025)
- [Depth Anything at Any Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01634/) (2025)
- [MonoMobility: Zero-Shot 3D Mobility Analysis from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11868/) (2025)
- [Physics-Informed Deformable Gaussian Splatting: Towards Unified Constitutive Laws for Time-Evolving Material Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06299/) (2025)
- [PacGDC: Label-Efficient Generalizable Depth Completion with Projection Ambiguity and Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07374/) (2025)
- [PALMS+: Modular Image-Based Floor Plan Localization Leveraging Depth Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09724/) (2025)
- [Underwater Monocular Metric Depth Estimation: Real-World Benchmarks and Synthetic Fine-Tuning with Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02148/) (2025)
- [Can Large Pretrained Depth Estimation Models Help With Image Dehazing?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00698/) (2025)
- [BRIDGE -- Building Reinforcement-Learning Depth-to-Image Data Generation Engine for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25077/) (2025)
- [R3ST: A Synthetic 3D Dataset With Realistic Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16784/) (2025)
- [Modality-Specific Hierarchical Enhancement for RGB-D Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02935/) (2026)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation via Neural Network with Learnable Algebraic Group and Ring Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24328/) (2026)
- [BED-SAM2: Boundary-Enhanced-Depth SAM2 via Monocular Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24893/) (2026)
- [SigLIP-HD by Fine-to-Coarse Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09488/) (2026)
- [Breaking the Horizontal Prior: From Long-Tailed Orientation Bias to Roll-Robust Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00678/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in zero-shot monocular depth estimation(MDE) have significantly improved generalization by unifying depth distributions through normalized depth representations and by leveraging large-scale unlabeled data via pseudo-label distillation. However, existing methods that rely on global depth normalization treat all depth values equally, which can amplify noise in pseudo-labels and reduce distillation effectiveness. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of depth normalization strategies in the context of pseudo-label distillation. Our study shows that, under recent distillation paradigms (e.g., shared-context distillation), normalization is not always necessary, as omitting it can help mitigate the impact of noisy supervision. Furthermore, rather than focusing solely on how depth information is represented, we propose Cross-Context Distillation, which integrates both global and local depth cues to enhance pseudo-label quality. We also introduce an assistant-guided distillation strategy that incorporates complementary depth priors from a diffusion-based teacher model, enhancing supervision diversity and robustness. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.