# Zero-shot Monocular Metric Depth for Endoscopic Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18642/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06839/) (2018)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [MiDaS v3.1 -- A Model Zoo for Robust Monocular Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14460/) (2023)
- [Neural Rendering for Stereo 3D Reconstruction of Deformable Tissues in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15255/) (2022)
- [CholecSeg8k: A Semantic Segmentation Dataset for Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy Based on Cholec80](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12453/) (2020)
- [Stereo Correspondence and Reconstruction of Endoscopic Data Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01133/) (2021)
- [Endo-Depth-and-Motion: Reconstruction and Tracking in Endoscopic Videos using Depth Networks and Photometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16525/) (2021)
- [Learning How To Robustly Estimate Camera Pose in Endoscopic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08023/) (2023)
- [EndoDAC: Efficient Adapting Foundation Model for Self-Supervised Depth Estimation from Any Endoscopic Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08672/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Siamese Learning on Stereo Image Pairs for Depth Estimation in Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08260/) (2017)
- [Long-Term Temporally Consistent Unpaired Video Translation from Simulated Surgical 3D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17204/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything in Medical Images: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16600/) (2024)
- [Transferring Relative Monocular Depth to Surgical Vision with Temporal Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06683/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Confidence-aware Monocular Depth Estimation for Minimally Invasive Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03571/) (2026)
- [Surgical Kinematics from Monocular Video with Learned Articulated Motion Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27227/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular relative and metric depth estimation has seen a tremendous boost in the last few years due to the sharp advancements in foundation models and in particular transformer based networks. As we start to see applications to the domain of endoscopic images, there is still a lack of robust benchmarks and high-quality datasets in that area. This paper addresses these limitations by presenting a comprehensive benchmark of state-of-the-art (metric and relative) depth estimation models evaluated on real, unseen endoscopic images, providing critical insights into their generalisation and performance in clinical scenarios. Additionally, we introduce and publish a novel synthetic dataset (EndoSynth) of endoscopic surgical instruments paired with ground truth metric depth and segmentation masks, designed to bridge the gap between synthetic and real-world data. We demonstrate that fine-tuning depth foundation models using our synthetic dataset boosts accuracy on most unseen real data by a significant margin. By providing both a benchmark and a synthetic dataset, this work advances the field of depth estimation for endoscopic images and serves as an important resource for future research. Project page, EndoSynth dataset and trained weights are available at https://github.com/TouchSurgery/EndoSynth.