# Depth AnyEvent: A Cross-Modal Distillation Paradigm for Event-Based Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15224 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15224/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2025.

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

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (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)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (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)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Event-based Learning of Optical Flow, Depth, and Egomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08156/) (2018)
- [DSEC: A Stereo Event Camera Dataset for Driving Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06011/) (2021)
- [The Multi Vehicle Stereo Event Camera Dataset: An Event Camera Dataset for 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10202/) (2018)
- [DDP: Diffusion Model for Dense Visual Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17559/) (2023)
- [MonoViT: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03543/) (2022)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Scale-Aware Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17253/) (2023)
- [Learning Temporally Consistent Video Depth from Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01493/) (2024)
- [Combining Events and Frames using Recurrent Asynchronous Multimodal Networks for Monocular Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09320/) (2021)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14816/) (2023)
- [Learning Monocular Dense Depth from Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08350/) (2020)
- [DiffusionDepth: Diffusion Denoising Approach for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05021/) (2023)
- [DiverseDepth: Affine-invariant Depth Prediction Using Diverse Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00569/) (2020)
- [CED: Color Event Camera Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10772/) (2019)
- [EventPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description for Event-based Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00210/) (2021)
- [Event-based Stereo Depth Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17680/) (2024)
- [LiDAR-Event Stereo Fusion with Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04633/) (2024)

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

- [EventVGGT: Exploring Cross-Modal Distillation for Consistent Event-based Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09385/) (2026)
- [Generative Event Pretraining with Foundation Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23032/) (2026)
- [The Semantic Lifecycle in Embodied AI: Acquisition, Representation and Storage via Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08876/) (2026)
- [Scaling Dense Event-Stream Pretraining from Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03969/) (2026)
- [EventGeM: Global-to-Local Feature Matching for Event-Based Visual Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05807/) (2026)
- [EventHub: Data Factory for Generalizable Event-Based Stereo Networks without Active Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02331/) (2026)
- [Bidirectional Cross-Modal Prompting for Event-Frame Asymmetric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15312/) (2026)
- [REALM: An RGB- and Event-Aligned Latent Manifold for Cross-Modal Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00271/) (2026)
- [M^2C-EvDet: Multi-Domain Multi-Order Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Event-based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24248/) (2026)
- [EVIS: Real-Time Event Camera Simulation with Multimodal Supervision in NVIDIA Isaac Sim](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08098/) (2026)
- [GoStop: Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Temporal Aggregation in Event-Based Feature Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15699/) (2026)
- [LiFR v2: Completion-Augmented Event Propagation for High-Rate Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25803/) (2026)
- [SFE-VGGT: Source-Free VGGT Distillation for Event-Based Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36929/) (2026)
- [Event-guided Neural Video Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02265/) (2026)
- [Depth Hypothesis Guided Iterative Refinement for Event-Image Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03439/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Event cameras capture sparse, high-temporal-resolution visual information, making them particularly suitable for challenging environments with high-speed motion and strongly varying lighting conditions. However, the lack of large datasets with dense ground-truth depth annotations hinders learning-based monocular depth estimation from event data. To address this limitation, we propose a cross-modal distillation paradigm to generate dense proxy labels leveraging a Vision Foundation Model (VFM). Our strategy requires an event stream spatially aligned with RGB frames, a simple setup even available off-the-shelf, and exploits the robustness of large-scale VFMs. Additionally, we propose to adapt VFMs, either a vanilla one like Depth Anything v2 (DAv2), or deriving from it a novel recurrent architecture to infer depth from monocular event cameras. We evaluate our approach with synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating that i) our cross-modal paradigm achieves competitive performance compared to fully supervised methods without requiring expensive depth annotations, and ii) our VFM-based models achieve state-of-the-art performance.