# EndoMUST: Monocular Depth Estimation for Robotic Endoscopy via End-to-end Multi-step Self-supervised Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16017 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16017/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [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)
- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [Stereo Correspondence and Reconstruction of Endoscopic Data Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01133/) (2021)
- [Occlusion Aware Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05890/) (2017)
- [Lite-Mono: A Lightweight CNN and Transformer Architecture for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13202/) (2022)
- [Endo-Depth-and-Motion: Reconstruction and Tracking in Endoscopic Videos using Depth Networks and Photometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16525/) (2021)
- [Structured Attention Guided Convolutional Neural Fields for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11029/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth and Ego-Motion Estimation in Endoscopy: Appearance Flow to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08122/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Reverse Domain Adaptation for Synthetic Medical Images via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06606/) (2017)
- [Dense Depth Estimation in Monocular Endoscopy with Self-supervised Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07766/) (2019)
- [EndoDAC: Efficient Adapting Foundation Model for Self-Supervised Depth Estimation from Any Endoscopic Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08672/) (2024)
- [SLAM Endoscopy enhanced by adversarial depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00283/) (2019)
- [CGI-Stereo: Accurate and Real-Time Stereo Matching via Context and Geometry Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02789/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Odometry and Depth Learning for Endoscopic Capsule Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01047/) (2018)
- [MonoPCC: Photometric-invariant Cycle Constraint for Monocular Depth Estimation of Endoscopic Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16571/) (2024)
- [Dual CNN Models for Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06324/) (2018)
- [BDIS: Bayesian Dense Inverse Searching Method for Real-Time Stereo Surgical Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03133/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation and ego-motion estimation are significant tasks for scene perception and navigation in stable, accurate and efficient robot-assisted endoscopy. To tackle lighting variations and sparse textures in endoscopic scenes, multiple techniques including optical flow, appearance flow and intrinsic image decomposition have been introduced into the existing methods. However, the effective training strategy for multiple modules are still critical to deal with both illumination issues and information interference for self-supervised depth estimation in endoscopy. Therefore, a novel framework with multistep efficient finetuning is proposed in this work. In each epoch of end-to-end training, the process is divided into three steps, including optical flow registration, multiscale image decomposition and multiple transformation alignments. At each step, only the related networks are trained without interference of irrelevant information. Based on parameter-efficient finetuning on the foundation model, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on self-supervised depth estimation on SCARED dataset and zero-shot depth estimation on Hamlyn dataset, with 4%~10% lower error. The evaluation code of this work has been published on https://github.com/BaymaxShao/EndoMUST.