# Bayesian Monocular Depth Refinement via Neural Radiance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03869/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Learning of Geometry and Context for Deep Stereo Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04309/) (2017)
- [Learning Depth with Convolutional Spatial Propagation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02695/) (2018)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Fields for Depth Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.6387/) (2014)
- [Predicting Sharp and Accurate Occlusion Boundaries in Monocular Depth Estimation Using Displacement Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12730/) (2020)
- [SCADE: NeRFs from Space Carving with Ambiguity-Aware Depth Estimates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13582/) (2023)
- [Multi-resolution Monocular Depth Map Fusion by Self-supervised Gradient-based Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01538/) (2022)
- [The Fourth Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17787/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation has applications in many fields, such as autonomous navigation and extended reality, making it an essential computer vision task. However, current methods often produce smooth depth maps that lack the fine geometric detail needed for accurate scene understanding. We propose MDENeRF, an iterative framework that refines monocular depth estimates using depth information from Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). MDENeRF consists of three components: (1) an initial monocular estimate for global structure, (2) a NeRF trained on perturbed viewpoints, with per-pixel uncertainty, and (3) Bayesian fusion of the noisy monocular and NeRF depths. We derive NeRF uncertainty from the volume rendering process to iteratively inject high-frequency fine details. Meanwhile, our monocular prior maintains global structure. We demonstrate improvements on key metrics and experiments using indoor scenes from the SUN RGB-D dataset.