# The Midas Touch for Metric Depth: Interpretable Metricization for Generalizable Depth Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16749 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16749/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12288/) (2023)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [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)
- [UniDepth: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18913/) (2024)
- [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)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [Sparsity Invariant CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06500/) (2017)
- [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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent foundation models have drastically improved the generalization of monocular relative depth estimation, yet recovering accurate metric depth from their estimates for depth perception tasks remains challenging due to scale ambiguity and local metric-scale inconsistency. Existing approaches recover metric depth from sparse observations using either explicit global affine transformation algorithms or implicit data-driven depth completion networks. The former cannot accommodate spatially varying relative-to-metric relationships, while the latter are sensitive to the distribution of sparse observations and may not fully exploit generalizable relative depth priors. To simultaneously address these issues, this study extends our previous work MTD and proposes MTDv2, a hybrid metric depth perception framework that combines explicit depth metricization with data-driven metric depth refinement. The explicit depth metricization process performs segment-wise affine transformations to recover spatially varying metric scales while preserving the geometric structure of relative depth, followed by pixel-wise depth refinement that propagates metric observations along paths with minimal accumulated geometric variation. The data-driven depth refinement process subsequently extends the explicit single-path depth propagation to a learnable multi-path formulation while preserving its interpretability. Extensive experiments conducted on 16 public datasets demonstrate the robust and generalizable depth scale recovery capability of MTDv2 across diverse sources of sparse observations and different depth estimation paradigms, as well as its broad applicability to downstream 3D perception tasks. Code will be publicly available at https://mias.group/MTD upon publication.