# DepthDark: Robust Monocular Depth Estimation for Low-Light Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18243 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18243/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [Visual-Language Prompt Tuning with Knowledge-guided Context Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13283/) (2023)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [Enforcing geometric constraints of virtual normal for depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12209/) (2019)
- [Neighbor2Neighbor: Self-Supervised Denoising from Single Noisy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02824/) (2021)
- [A Physics-based Noise Formation Model for Extreme Low-light Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12751/) (2020)
- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [HR-Depth: High Resolution Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07356/) (2020)
- [Physics-based Noise Modeling for Extreme Low-light Photography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02158/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Noise Synthesis and Modeling in Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04756/) (2021)
- [Regularizing Nighttime Weirdness: Efficient Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03830/) (2021)
- [Flare7K: A Phenomenological Nighttime Flare Removal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06570/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for All Day Images using Domain Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07628/) (2021)
- [RobustSAM: Segment Anything Robustly on Degraded Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09627/) (2024)
- [Deep Digging into the Generalization of Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11083/) (2022)
- [When the Sun Goes Down: Repairing Photometric Losses for All-Day Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13850/) (2022)
- [Learnability Enhancement for Low-light Raw Denoising: Where Paired Real Data Meets Noise Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06103/) (2022)
- [The Relative Importance of Depth Cues and Semantic Edges for Indoor Mobility Using Simulated Prosthetic Vision in Immersive Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05066/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in the Dark: Towards Data Distribution Compensation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13854/) (2024)
- [VGNC: Reducing the Overfitting of Sparse-view 3DGS via Validation-guided Gaussian Number Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14548/) (2025)
- [Geometry-Aware Reference Synthesis for Multi-View Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08601/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, foundation models for monocular depth estimation have received increasing attention. Current methods mainly address typical daylight conditions, but their effectiveness notably decreases in low-light environments. There is a lack of robust foundational models for monocular depth estimation specifically designed for low-light scenarios. This largely stems from the absence of large-scale, high-quality paired depth datasets for low-light conditions and the effective parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategy. To address these challenges, we propose DepthDark, a robust foundation model for low-light monocular depth estimation. We first introduce a flare-simulation module and a noise-simulation module to accurately simulate the imaging process under nighttime conditions, producing high-quality paired depth datasets for low-light conditions. Additionally, we present an effective low-light PEFT strategy that utilizes illumination guidance and multiscale feature fusion to enhance the model's capability in low-light environments. Our method achieves state-of-the-art depth estimation performance on the challenging nuScenes-Night and RobotCar-Night datasets, validating its effectiveness using limited training data and computing resources.