# Accuracy Does Not Guarantee Human-Likeness: Cross-Domain Human-Centered Benchmark in Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08163 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08163/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers to 22 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05442/) (2023)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)
- [Generalisation in humans and deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08750/) (2018)
- [ReFusion: 3D Reconstruction in Dynamic Environments for RGB-D Cameras Exploiting Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02082/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Transformer-Based Attention Networks for Continuous Pixel-Wise Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12091/) (2021)
- [Revealing the Dark Secrets of Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13543/) (2022)
- [Towards Better Generalization: Joint Depth-Pose Learning without PoseNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01314/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Scale-consistent Depth Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11610/) (2021)
- [Global-Local Path Networks for Monocular Depth Estimation with Vertical CutDepth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07436/) (2022)
- [SC-DepthV3: Robust Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03660/) (2022)
- [Toward Practical Monocular Indoor Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02306/) (2021)
- [P2Net: Patch-match and Plane-regularization for Unsupervised Indoor Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07696/) (2020)
- [Auto-Rectify Network for Unsupervised Indoor Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02708/) (2020)
- [StructDepth: Leveraging the structural regularities for self-supervised indoor depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08574/) (2021)
- [Do better ImageNet classifiers assess perceptual similarity better?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04946/) (2022)
- [Instance-wise Occlusion and Depth Orders in Natural Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14562/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning-based Depth Estimation Methods from Monocular Image and Videos: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19675/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly used as functional models of human vision, yet standard monocular depth estimation (MDE) benchmarks largely evaluate physical accuracy rather than behavioral alignment with humans. We introduce a cross-domain behavioral benchmark that aligns newly collected human absolute-distance judgments, physical ground truth, and model predictions at 16 locations in each of 652 KITTI and 654 NYU Depth V2 scenes. Human-model similarity was measured image-wise by partial correlation between scale-and-shift-aligned estimates while controlling for physical depth, and reference results were obtained for 69 diverse MDE models. Human error patterns were highly reliable, and most models showed positive but substantially lower similarity to humans. Human similarity, however, did not increase monotonically with metric accuracy: within each dataset, high-accuracy models converged toward similar residual error structures that remained distinct from humans, while both human-similarity scores and error-space organization were only weakly preserved across datasets. Thus, physical accuracy and human-like behavior are complementary, domain-sensitive dimensions of MDE performance. Our benchmark will provide a reusable basis for assessing future models along both dimensions.