arXiv Computer Vision

MDE-VIO: Enhancing Visual-Inertial Odometry Using Learned Depth Priors

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%.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Monocular Visual Odometry without Calibration or Test-time Optimization

The paper introduces CalfVO, a monocular visual odometry system that operates without camera intrinsics, test‑time optimization, bundle adjustment, or loop closure. Using a transformer, it predicts relative poses with separate rotation and translation confidences over overlapping image windows, then aggregates these predictions via a confidence‑weighted module to produce a single trajectory. CalfVO achieves the highest accuracy among calibration‑free methods across five benchmarks and runs at 53 FPS, outperforming all baselines.

By Vladimir Yugay, Duy-Kien Nguyen, Theo Gevers, Cees G. M. Snoek, Martin R. Oswald
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
6d ago

FounRef: Robust, Structure-Preserving, and Fast Metric Refinement of Frozen Monocular Foundation Priors with Sparse Anchors

FounRef is a training‑free method that refines frozen monocular foundation priors into dense metric depth by aligning them with sparse metric anchors. It validates anchors against the prior’s predictions, rejects misaligned ones, and applies a structure‑preserving solver to correct depth globally and locally while preserving fine geometry. The approach works out of the box on unseen cameras and scenes, achieving up to 24% lower depth error, 92% lower surface‑normal noise, and nearly 15× faster inference than a leading depth‑completion network.

By Dan Halperin, Mirko M\"ahlisch
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 29

StereoGS: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting via Stereo Priors

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has achieved remarkable success in real-time novel view synthesis, yet it suffers from severe overfitting under sparse-view settings due to insufficient geometric constraints. While recent methods introduce monocular depth priors to mitigate this, they inherently struggle with scale ambiguity and cross-view inconsistency, leading to defective geometry.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

SFVO: Decoupled Confidence-Guided Stereo-Flow Visual Odometry with Bidirectional PnP

SFVO is a stereo visual‑odometry framework that leverages pretrained stereo‑matching and optical‑flow models to obtain dense stereo and temporal correspondences. Rather than learning pose directly from images, it maps these correspondences into geometric constraints and predicts trustworthy points using decoupled confidence maps for rotation and translation. Experiments on both outdoor and indoor datasets show that SFVO delivers robust, accurate pose estimation with strong generalization, and the authors plan to release the code.

By Kai Zhang, Guoyang Zhao, Jun Ma
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

VI3: Grounding Pretrained 3D Foundation Models with Inertial Cues

VI3 is a model‑agnostic framework that grounds pretrained 3D foundation models (3DFMs) by using inertial measurement unit (IMU) data to provide metric scale. It initializes and preintegrates IMU readings to create a metric motion reference, which is then used to recover the scale of 3DFM outputs. The approach includes adaptable anchoring strategies for different 3DFM architectures and demonstrates scale recovery on synthetic and real aerial datasets without ground‑truth supervision.

By Ernesto Lozano, Alberto Jaenal, Javier Civera