# Beyond Visual Ambiguity: Guiding Robust Monocular Depth Estimation in Challenging Scenarios via Detailed Long Captions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28285/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [Long-CLIP: Unlocking the Long-Text Capability of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15378/) (2024)
- [Lotus: Diffusion-based Visual Foundation Model for High-quality Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18124/) (2024)
- [Open Challenges in Deep Stereo: the Booster Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04671/) (2022)
- [BokehMe: When Neural Rendering Meets Classical Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.12614/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation: Let's Talk About The Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08357/) (2023)
- [3D Cinemagraphy from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05724/) (2023)
- [CutDepth:Edge-aware Data Augmentation in Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07684/) (2021)
- [EVP: Enhanced Visual Perception using Inverse Multi-Attentive Feature Refinement and Regularized Image-Text Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08548/) (2023)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation in Non-Lambertian Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06083/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) faces challenges with non-Lambertian surfaces and adverse weather conditions due to the visual ambiguities inherent in single-image limited information. Existing works address them in isolation via image inpainting or augmentation, yielding limited robustness gains. Language, as a powerful complementary modality to vision, is demonstrated to enhance the visual perception capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) via detailed long captions. However, prior language-integrated MDE methods fail to fully harness this potential due to short text input with limited information, coarse global text feature learning, and limited language guidance during depth decoding. To address these limitations, we propose CapDepth, a novel framework for robust MDE that leverages guidance from detailed long captions to alleviate visual ambiguities in both challenging scenarios. First, we design a detailed long caption input template that explicitly conveys rich spatial relationships among multiple atom sentences. Second, a dynamic caption encoder is introduced to extract fine-grained depth-relevant text features via progressive masked attention. Finally, we propose a text-adaptive decoder that guides enhanced depth decoding with text features via stable adaptive layer normalization. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of CapDepth, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving depth error reductions of 25.0% on non-Lambertian surfaces and 22.0% under adverse weather conditions.