# Toward A Better Understanding of Monocular Depth Evaluation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19814 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19814/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)
- [MoGe: Unlocking Accurate Monocular Geometry Estimation for Open-Domain Images with Optimal Training Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19115/) (2024)
- [GeoWizard: Unleashing the Diffusion Priors for 3D Geometry Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12013/) (2024)
- [MoGe-2: Accurate Monocular Geometry with Metric Scale and Sharp Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02546/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Single-Image Depth Perception in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03901/) (2016)
- [MiDaS v3.1 -- A Model Zoo for Robust Monocular Relative Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14460/) (2023)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [Spring: A High-Resolution High-Detail Dataset and Benchmark for Scene Flow, Optical Flow and Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01943/) (2023)
- [Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09310/) (2023)
- [Evaluation of CNN-based Single-Image Depth Estimation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01328/) (2018)
- [Infinigen Indoors: Photorealistic Indoor Scenes using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11824/) (2024)
- [OASIS: A Large-Scale Dataset for Single Image 3D in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13215/) (2020)
- [On the Importance of Accurate Geometry Data for Dense 3D Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14840/) (2023)
- [SharpDepth: Sharpening Metric Depth Predictions Using Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18229/) (2024)
- [From 2D to 3D: Re-thinking Benchmarking of Monocular Depth Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08122/) (2022)
- [The 3D-PC: a benchmark for visual perspective taking in humans and machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04138/) (2024)
- [Mind The Edge: Refining Depth Edges in Sparsely-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05315/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Can Single-View Mesh Reconstruction Generalize to Robot Camera Rotation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22987/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation is an important task with rapid progress, but how to evaluate it is not fully resolved, as evidenced by a lack of standardization in existing literature and a large selection of evaluation metrics whose trade-offs and behaviors are not fully understood. This paper contributes a novel, quantitative analysis of existing metrics in terms of their sensitivity to various types of perturbations of ground truth, emphasizing comparison to human judgment. Our analysis reveals that existing metrics are severely under-sensitive to curvature perturbation such as making smooth surfaces bumpy. To remedy this, we introduce a new metric based on relative surface normals, along with new depth visualization tools and a principled method to create composite metrics with better human alignment. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/princeton-vl/evalmde.