FoundDP: Revisiting Weak Disparity Observability in Dual-Pixel Depth Estimation

Dual-pixel (DP) imaging enables metric depth estimation from a single camera using sub-aperture disparity. However, the extremely small effective baseline limits disparity observability, leading to structural degradation and depth failure in textureless, low-contrast, or downsampled regions. Existing DP-based methods rely primarily on local disparity cues and therefore become unreliable when disparity signals are weak or ambiguous. To address this limitation, we propose FoundDP, a unified framework that integrates metric DP depth with global structural priors from a monocular depth foundation model. Our method preserves metric scale through DP-derived depth and leverages Vision Transformer (ViT) features to restore structural consistency in weak-disparity regions. To ensure reliable metric guidance under DP imaging conditions, we identify and mitigate ViT representation degradation induced by DP defocus blur via ViT feature alignment, enabling stable metric-guided depth estimation. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world DP benchmarks show that FoundDP delivers superior performance, with consistent gains in structural fidelity and metric accuracy, especially under reduced disparity observability. Code will be available at: https://github.com/EchoLighting/FoundDP