Depth Estimation

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Overview

Depth estimation studies how to recover per-pixel distance and scene geometry from images, video, stereo pairs, and sensors such as LiDAR, radar, event, thermal, and time-of-flight cameras. Methods range from stereo and multi-view geometry to self-supervised monocular learning, sparse-to-dense depth completion, and pretrained vision or video models guided by sparse metric measurements. Current systems increasingly use temporal consistency, uncertainty estimates, camera-aware adaptation, and sensor fusion in settings such as driving, endoscopy, panoramas, and transparent scenes. A central challenge is generalizing across cameras, domains, lighting, and motion while balancing metric accuracy, geometric consistency, and real-time efficiency; benchmarks such as KITTI and NYUv2 also highlight the limits of evaluation when reliable ground-truth depth is scarce.

Latest papers

CardsList

198 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, down 25% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Deep Learning Aided Vision System for Planetary Rovers

    Mar 26, 2026Lomash Relia, Jai G Singla, Amitabh +1Stereo Depth EstimationRobotic Perception

    Department of Computer Engineering Devang Patel Institute of Advanced Technology and Research Anand, India · Space Applications Centre Indian Space Research Organization Ahmedabad, India

  2. EndoVGGT: GNN-Enhanced Depth Estimation for Surgical 3D Reconstruction

    Mar 25, 2026Falong Fan, Yi Xie, Arnis Lektauers +2Endoscopic 3D Reconstruction3D Reconstruction

    University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

  3. PAS3R: Pose-Adaptive Streaming 3D Reconstruction for Long Video Sequences

    Mar 22, 2026Lanbo Xu, Liang Guo, Caigui Jiang +1Streaming 3D ReconstructionMonocular 3D Reconstruction

    State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China · University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR47TJ, United Kingdom

  4. ToFormer: Towards Large-scale Scenario Depth Completion for Lightweight ToF Camera

    Mar 21, 2026Juncheng Chen, Tiancheng Lai, Xingpeng Wang +4Depth CompletionDepth Estimation

    State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Institute of Cyber Systems and Control, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. · Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University, Huzhou, China. · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China.

  5. SeeClear: Reliable Transparent Object Depth Estimation via Generative Opacification

    Mar 20, 2026Xiaoying Wang, Yumeng He, Jingkai Shi +4Depth EstimationMonocular Depth Estimation

    University of California, Los Angeles. · University of Southern California. · University of Utah.

  6. VGGT-360: Geometry-Consistent Zero-Shot Panoramic Depth Estimation

    Mar 19, 2026Jiayi Yuan, Haobo Jiang, De Wen Soh +1Panoramic Depth EstimationDepth Estimation

    Singapore University of Technology and Design · Nanyang Technological University

  7. Semantic Segmentation and Depth Estimation for Real-Time Lunar Surface Mapping Using 3D Gaussian Splatting

    Mar 18, 2026Guillem Casadesus Vila, Adam Dai, Grace Gao3D MappingStereo Depth Estimation

    Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States

  8. SpiderCam: Low-Power Snapshot Depth from Differential Defocus

    Mar 18, 2026Marcos A. Ferreira, Tianao Li, John Mamish +4Depth EstimationComputational Imaging

    Northwestern University · Georgia Institute of Technology · Purdue University

  9. LLM-Powered Flood Depth Estimation from Social Media Imagery: A Vision-Language Model Framework with Mechanistic Interpretability for Transportation Resilience

    Mar 17, 2026Nafis Fuad, Xiaodong QianDepth EstimationIntelligent Transportation Systems

    Civil and Environmental Engineering Wayne State University 5050 Anthony Wayne Drive, Detroit, MI, USA, 48202 · Civil and Environmental Engineering Institute for AI and Data Science (AIDaS) Wayne State University 5050 Anthony Wayne Drive, Detroit, MI, USA, 48202

  10. WildDepth: A Multimodal Dataset for 3D Wildlife Perception and Depth Estimation

    Mar 17, 2026Muhammad Aamir, Naoya Muramatsu, Sangyun Shin +6Depth Estimation3D Reconstruction

    University of Oxford · University of Cape Town · University College London

  11. Near-light Photometric Stereo with Symmetric Lights

    Mar 17, 2026Lilika Makabe, Heng Guo, Hiroaki Santo +2Surface Normal EstimationDepth Estimation

    Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, Japan.

  12. PureCLIP-Depth: Prompt-Free and Decoder-Free Monocular Depth Estimation within CLIP Embedding Space

    Mar 17, 2026Ryutaro Miya, Kazuyoshi Fushinobu, Tatsuya KawaguchiDepth EstimationMonocular Depth Estimation

    Institute of Science Tokyo

  13. Reference-Free Omnidirectional Stereo Matching via Multi-View Consistency Maximization

    Mar 16, 2026Lehuai Xu, Weiming Zhang, Yang Li +2Panoramic Depth EstimationStereo Matching

    Nanjing University, Nanjing, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · HKUST(GZ), Guangzhou, China

  14. Thermal Image Refinement with Depth Estimation using Recurrent Networks for Monocular ORB-SLAM3

    Mar 16, 2026Hürkan Şahin, Huy Xuan Pham, Van Huyen Dang +2Depth EstimationMonocular Depth Estimation

    Automatic Control Group (RAT), Paderborn University, 33098 Paderborn, Germany · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark, and also with Upteko ApS, Denmark

  15. Fractal Autoregressive Depth Estimation with Continuous Token Diffusion

    Mar 16, 2026Jinchang Zhang, Xinrou Kang, Guoyu LuDepth EstimationMonocular Depth Estimation

    Intelligent Vision and Sensing (IVS) Lab at SUNY Binghamton University

  16. Interp3R: Continuous-time 3D Geometry Estimation with Frames and Events

    Mar 15, 2026Shuang Guo, Filbert Febryanto, Lei Sun +2Vision Foundation Models3D Reconstruction

    TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany · Robotics Institute Germany, Berlin, Germany · INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria +1

  17. UE5-Forest: A Photorealistic Synthetic Stereo Dataset for UAV Forestry Depth Estimation

    Mar 13, 2026Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang +2Depth EstimationSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

    Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand · Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Canterbury, Canterbury, New Zealand

  18. DVD: Deterministic Video Depth Estimation with Generative Priors

    Mar 12, 2026Hongfei Zhang, Harold Haodong Chen, Chenfei Liao +12Video Depth EstimationDepth Estimation

    HKUST(GZ) · HKUST · UCSD +5

  19. R4Det: 4D Radar-Camera Fusion for High-Performance 3D Object Detection

    Mar 12, 2026Zhongyu Xia, Yousen Tang, Yongtao Wang +23D Object DetectionCamera-Radar Fusion

    Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University · EBTech Co. Ltd

  20. SurgFed: Language-guided Multi-Task Federated Learning for Surgical Video Understanding

    Mar 10, 2026Zheng Fang, Ziwei Niu, Ziyue Wang +5Surgical Video UnderstandingFederated Learning

    National University of Singapore, Singapore · Spectral AI Team, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), China · Zhejiang University, China +1

  21. EventVGGT: Exploring Cross-Modal Distillation for Consistent Event-based Depth Estimation

    Mar 10, 2026Yinrui Ren, Jinjing Zhu, Kanghao Chen +8Event-Based VisionDepth Estimation

    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · South China Normal University · Chinese University of Hong Kong

  22. RayD3D: Distilling Depth Knowledge Along the Ray for Robust Multi-View 3D Object Detection

    Mar 8, 2026Rui Ding, Zhaonian Kuang, Zongwei Zhou +3Multi-View 3D Object Detection3D Object Detection

    Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China · Horizon Robotics, Beijing, China · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China +1

  23. RePer-360: Releasing Perspective Priors for 360∘^\circ Depth Estimation via Self-Modulation

    Mar 6, 2026Cheng Guan, Chunyu Lin, Zhijie Shen +2Domain AdaptationDepth Estimation

    Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China. · Visual Intelligence +X International Cooperation Joint Laboratory of MOE, Beijing 100044, China.

  24. LiDAR Prompted Spatio-Temporal Multi-View Stereo for Autonomous Driving

    Mar 4, 2026Qihao Sun, Jiarun Liu, Ziqian Ni +5Multi-View Depth EstimationDepth Estimation

    Unmanned Vehicle Dept., CaiNiao Inc., Alibaba Group · Harbin Institute of Technology

  25. DAGE: Dual-Stream Architecture for Efficient and Fine-Grained Geometry Estimation

    Mar 4, 2026Tuan Duc Ngo, Jiahui Huang, Seoung Wug Oh +4Multi-View 3D ReconstructionVideo Depth Estimation

    UMass Amherst · Adobe Research · TU Crete

  26. Confidence-aware Monocular Depth Estimation for Minimally Invasive Surgery

    Mar 3, 2026Muhammad Asad, Emanuele Colleoni, Pritesh Mehta +7Depth EstimationMonocular Depth Estimation

    Medtronic Surgical, London, UK. · UCL Hawkes Institute, University College London, London,UK.

  27. Any Resolution Any Geometry: From Multi-View To Multi-Patch

    Mar 3, 2026Wenqing Cui, Zhenyu Li, Mykola Lavreniuk +4Depth EstimationSurface Normal Estimation

    KAUST · Space Research Institute NASU-SSAU

  28. StreamTTO: Efficient Online Test-Time Optimization for Video Depth Completion

    Mar 2, 2026Minseok Seo, Wonjun Lee, Jaehyuk Jang +1Depth EstimationDepth Completion

    Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Republic of Korea

  29. SO3UFormer: Learning Intrinsic Spherical Features for Rotation-Robust Panoramic Dense Prediction

    Feb 26, 2026Qinfeng Zhu, Yunxi Jiang, Lei FanDepth EstimationVision Transformer

    University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. · CNRS, France. · Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China.

  30. EndoDDC: Learning Sparse to Dense Reconstruction for Endoscopic Robotic Navigation via Diffusion Depth Completion

    Feb 25, 2026Yinheng Lin, Yiming Huang, Beilei Cui +4Depth EstimationDepth Completion

    All authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.