cs.CVJun 10, 2026

DepthMaster: Unified Monocular Depth Estimation for Perspective and Panoramic Images

Authors: Pengfei Wang, Shihao Wang, Liyi Chen, Zhiyuan Ma, Guowen Zhang, Lei Zhang

Abstract

While monocular depth estimation has achieved significant progress, achieving generalized metric depth estimation for both narrow field-of-view (FoV) perspectives and 360∘360^\circ panoramas remains an unsolved challenge. Existing methods are often tailored to specific camera types and struggle to produce accurate metric depth that generalizes across diverse settings. This limitation stems from two key challenges: the inherent geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic cameras, and the scarcity of panoramic training data with metric annotations. In this work, we introduce DepthMaster, a unified metric depth estimation framework. Rather than employing specialized networks to learn spherical distortions, we reformulate the problem by decomposing panoramic images into overlapping perspective patches. Crucially, distinct from prior projection-based methods that rely on ad-hoc architectural modifications to handle boundaries, we introduce a novel Correspondence Consistency Loss (CCL) and inject virtual projection cameras as geometric priors, allowing us to seamlessly stitch the patches while avoiding specialized operators and keeping the backbone largely compatible with standard Transformer designs. This strategy also resolves the geometric differences by unifying all inputs into a canonical perspective representation, and effectively circumvents data scarcity by directly unlocking powerful metric priors from vast perspective datasets. Trained on a mixed dataset that contains only one panorama dataset, DepthMaster achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 13 diverse datasets, outperforming not only universal methods but also leading specialist models in both perspective and panoramic domains.

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Mar 6, 2026cs.CV

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Recent depth foundation models trained on perspective imagery achieve strong performance, yet generalize poorly to 360∘^\circ images due to the substantial geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic domains. Moreover, fully fine-tuning these models typically requires large amounts of panoramic data. To address this issue, we propose RePer-360, a distortion-aware self-modulation framework for monocular panoramic depth estimation that adapts depth foundation models while preserving powerful pretrained perspective priors. Specifically, we design a lightweight geometry-aligned guidance module to derive a modulation signal from two complementary projections (i.e., ERP and CP) and use it to guide the model toward the panoramic domain without overwriting its pretrained perspective knowledge. We further introduce a Self-Conditioned AdaLN-Zero mechanism that produces pixel-wise scaling factors to reduce the feature distribution gap between the perspective and panoramic domains. In addition, a cubemap-domain consistency loss further improves training stability and cross-projection alignment. By shifting the focus from complementary-projection fusion to panoramic domain adaptation under preserved pretrained perspective priors, RePer-360 surpasses standard fine-tuning methods while using only 1% of the training data. Under the same in-domain training setting, it further achieves an approximately 20% improvement in RMSE. The code is available at https://github.com/munimo/RePer360.
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Monocular Depth EstimationDepth EstimationPanoramic ImagesWireless Foundation ModelsPrior KnowledgeModifications
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May 22, 2026cs.CV

DepthAgent: Towards Better Universal Depth Estimation via Sample-wise Expert Selection

Monocular metric depth estimation has achieved strong progress with large-scale training and universal-camera modeling, yet robust deployment across diverse camera settings, such as perspective, fisheye, and panoramic images, remains challenging. Existing methods typically rely on a single depth estimator, overlooking that different models encode different camera assumptions and perform best under different input domains. In this paper, we show that depth experts exhibit strong sample-wise complementarity: model preference is highly correlated with camera geometry, and multi-model fusion brings the largest gains on difficult samples where individual experts are unreliable. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textbf{\ours}, a vision-language agent for adaptive monocular depth estimation. DepthAgent treats existing depth models as frozen tools and learns to analyze scene and camera cues, invoke suitable experts through multi-turn tool utilization, and select or fuse their predictions for each input. To optimize such discrete decision-making toward dense geometric quality, we design a multi-reward reinforcement fine-tuning scheme that jointly encourages valid tool execution, camera/scene analysis, expert-selection quality, and inference efficiency. Extensive experiments across perspective, fisheye, and panoramic benchmarks show that \ours consistently outperforms individual experts, fixed model fusion, and different selection strategies, with strong improvements on challenging samples, highlighting the critical role of expert selection and fusion. The code and model will be released upon publication.
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Geometric Distillation from Rectified Stereo: Leveraging Epipolar Cues for Monocular Depth

Monocular depth foundation models have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities across diverse environments. However, they continue to struggle with metric depth estimation in diverse environments. This limitation stems from the inherent scale ambiguity of single-view inference, leading to misaligned scale predictions even when the relative geometry is accurate. Conversely, recent multi-view foundation models leverage cross-view cues to learn robust scene-level geometry and consistent scale. Yet, these benefits typically vanish during single-image inference, as the absence of explicit geometric constraints causes performance to degrade. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel framework that transfers the scale-aware geometric priors of multi-view models into monocular depth foundation models. Specifically, we introduce an Epipolar Distillation (EpiDistill), an approach utilizing Rectified Stereo Tokens, which enables the single-view prediction model to retain epipolar attention patterns and maintain geometric consistency without requiring multi-view inputs at inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves zero-shot metric depth estimation, particularly on challenging datasets like ETH3D and DIODE where scale alignment is critical. Furthermore, our approach is model-agnostic, consistently boosting the performance of state-of-the-art ViT-based models, including UniDepthV2 and DepthPro.
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