arXiv Computer Vision

Physically Grounded Monocular Depth via Nanophotonic Wavefront Encoding

The paper proposes using ultrathin metalenses to physically encode metric depth cues into two polarized optical wavefronts, enabling accurate monocular depth estimation. By aligning a pretrained depth foundation model with these optical signals through direct fine‑tuning, and by creating a simulation pipeline to generate realistic metalens responses from RGB‑D data, the authors bridge the gap between nanophotonics and learned depth priors. Experiments show that this method surpasses conventional monocular metric depth estimation and depth‑from‑defocus baselines.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Geometric Distillation from Rectified Stereo: Leveraging Epipolar Cues for Monocular Depth

The paper introduces Epipolar Distillation (EpiDistill), a method that transfers scale‑aware geometric priors from multi‑view models to monocular depth foundation models using Rectified Stereo Tokens. By preserving epipolar attention patterns, the single‑view model maintains geometric consistency without needing multi‑view inputs during inference. Experiments show significant improvements in zero‑shot metric depth estimation on challenging datasets such as ETH3D and DIODE, and the approach consistently boosts performance of state‑of‑the‑art ViT‑based models like UniDepthV2 and DepthPro.

By Jung-Hee Kim, Xiaoming Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Collaborative On-Sensor Array Cameras

The paper presents a collaborative on‑sensor array camera that uses a distributed meta‑optics learning method to jointly optimize a 100‑million‑nanopost metasurface array for broadband visible imaging. By training the array end‑to‑end with a learned meta‑atom proxy and a parallax‑aware, noise‑aware reconstruction algorithm, the design overcomes the wavelength‑dependent limitations of traditional metalenses. Experimental results show that the camera delivers consistent image quality across varying scene illumination spectra without relying on generative reconstruction.

By Jipeng Sun, Kaixuan Wei, Thomas Eboli, Congli Wang, Cheng Zheng, Zhihao Zhou, Arka Majumdar, Wolfgang Heidrich, Felix Heide
arXiv AI
Jul 7

MetricAnything: Scaling Metric Depth Pretraining with Noisy Heterogeneous Sources

arXiv:2601. 22054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling has powered recent advances in vision foundation models, yet extending this paradigm to metric depth estimation remains challenging due to heterogeneous sensor noise, camera-dependent biases, and metric ambiguity in noisy cross-source 3D data.

By Baorui Ma, Jiahui Yang, Donglin Di, Xuancheng Zhang, Jianxun Cui, Hao Li, Yan Xie, Wei Chen
arXiv AI
Aug 19

PXDepth: Pixel-Space Modeling for Structure Preserving Monocular Depth Estimation

PXDepth is a monocular depth estimation model that separates global context modeling from pixel-level depth prediction. It uses a large-patch Vision Transformer to capture scene context and a pixel-space predictor with Context‑Modulated Pixel Transformer blocks to preserve high‑resolution spatial details. The approach maintains fine structures and sharp boundaries while achieving competitive global depth accuracy in zero‑shot benchmarks.

By Zhiyuan Yuan, Guanying Chen, Lingteng Qiu, Ruimao Zhang, Shuguang Cui, Xiaochun Cao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 1

OptiGeo: Efficient Monocular Geometry for Embodied Perception in Optically Challenging Scenes

arXiv:2608.29881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monocular depth estimation has achieved strong open-domain generalization, yet reliable robotic deployment remains difficult in transparent, reflective...

By Muxin Liu, Tianbo Liu, Jing Xia, Xiaoyang Lyu, Xiaoshan Wu, Bo Wang, Peng Dai, Zhongrui Wang, Shaoshuai Shi, Xiaojuan Qi