The paper introduces FlexDepth, a family of self‑supervised monocular depth estimation models designed for robust driving perception. FlexDepth uses a two‑stage static‑dynamic decoupled training strategy and a Scale‑Driven Decoder that selects components based on scale size, enabling efficient feature fusion and high‑precision depth maps. Experiments on driving benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance across arbitrary scales with minimal computational cost, with the smallest model (Flex‑Nano) achieving 37.6 FPS on mobile devices.
By Zhaowen Zhu, Li Zhang, Yujie Chen, Tian Zhang, Yingjie Wang, Mingxia Zhan
Monocular depth estimation has seen remarkable progress through foundation models achieving robust zero-shot generalization, yet their computational demands place them far beyond the reach of embedded and mobile platforms. Lightweight alternatives exist, but have been developed almost exclusively within single-domain, self-supervised paradigms, failing silently under domain shift.
arXiv:2608.13147v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Camera-based autonomous driving perception requires a shared representation that preserves metric 3D structure across synchronized multi-camera str...
By Longfei Xu, Xiaohui Wang, Zehao Huang, Han Li, Ya Yang, Naiyan Wang, Si Liu
The paper introduces a biologically inspired framework that learns object‑centric visual representations from raw videos without human annotations or camera calibration. By using motion boundaries detected via optical flow and clustering to create pseudo‑instance masks, the method supervises a single‑image encoder with pixel‑level pairwise metric learning. Training on 195 million pseudo‑labeled frames and expanding to 421 million frames through Motion‑Verified Self‑Training, the approach yields Swin‑based encoders that outperform or match supervised and self‑supervised baselines on tasks such as monocular depth estimation, 3D object detection, 3D occupancy prediction, and end‑to‑end planning.
By Boshi Li, Xiaohui Wang, Xiaoyang Wu, Zhichao Li, Ya Yang, Naiyan Wang
arXiv:2609.22896v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Autonomous vehicles operating in open-world scenarios are inevitably confronted with previously unknown objects, such as exotic animals or loose cargo....
By Serin Varghese, Fabian H\"uger, Kira Maag
The paper introduces PIMDE, a self‑supervised monocular depth estimation framework that decomposes input images into perceptual feature maps, each encoding a specific visual cue. Separate depth branches process these maps to produce individual depth estimates, which are then fused explicitly. Experiments on the KITTI benchmark show that PIMDE matches the accuracy of existing self‑supervised methods while offering clearer insight into how each perceptual cue contributes to depth prediction.
By Zain Ul Abidin, George Dimas, Dimitris K. Iakovidis
arXiv:2607. 07885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic obstacle avoidance in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous mobile robots, particularly when large-scale robot-specific training data and simulation-based policies are impractical.
By Erik Jagnandan, Mulugeta Haile, Gregory Barber, Pratik Chaudhari
MDE-VIO integrates learned depth priors into the VINS-Mono optimization backend to improve visual‑inertial odometry in low‑texture environments. The framework enforces affine‑invariant depth consistency and pairwise ordinal constraints while filtering unstable artifacts with variance‑based gating, keeping computation within edge‑device limits. Experiments on TartanGround and M3ED datasets show the method prevents divergence and reduces Absolute Trajectory Error by up to 28.3%.
By Arda Alniak, Sinan Kalkan, Mustafa Mert Ankarali, Afsar Saranli, Abdullah Aydin Alatan
The paper presents a foundation-guided auto‑annotation pipeline that improves standard autonomous driving object detectors in adverse weather. By benchmarking YOLOv8, Co‑DETR, and SAM3 on a custom dataset of 25 operational scenarios, the authors find SAM3 to be the most robust and use it offline to generate pseudo‑labels. Fine‑tuning YOLOv8 on these labels boosts overall mAP by 16.04% and yields significant gains in specific conditions such as Residential Direct Sunlight (32.73%) and Highway Fog (28.65%).
By Sepideh Gohari, Goodarz Mehr, Azim Eskandarian
arXiv:2503. 19947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generalized metric depth understanding is critical for precise vision-guided robotics, which current state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision-encoders do not support.
By Paul Koch, J\"org Kr\"uger
LiteViLNet is a lightweight RGB‑geometry fusion network for road segmentation that uses a MobileNetV3 RGB encoder and a tiny depth‑wise‑separable geometry encoder. Its multi‑scale fusion module enhances modality‑specific features, performs cross‑modal interaction, and applies adaptive gating, while a depth‑wise large‑kernel bridge expands contextual support with minimal overhead. The U‑Net‑style decoder is trained with deep supervision, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on KITTI and ORFD benchmarks and running at up to 68.73 FPS on a Jetson Orin NX with TensorRT FP16.
By Daojie Peng, Bingtao Wang, Fulong Ma, Liang Zhang, Jun Ma
arXiv:2512. 16919v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Perceiving and reconstructing 3D scene geometry from visual inputs is crucial for autonomous driving.
By Sicheng Zuo, Zixun Xie, Wenzhao Zheng, Shaoqing Xu, Fang Li, Shengyin Jiang, Long Chen, Zhi-Xin Yang, Jiwen Lu