DXPR is a depth‑based cross‑modal place recognition framework that matches monocular camera queries to a LiDAR map using a single vision foundation model backbone. By converting both modalities into a unified depth image representation, DXPR learns modality‑invariant global descriptors without modality‑specific encoders. A geometry‑aware overlap miner refines pairwise metric learning by computing pixel‑level overlap scores, and extensive tests on KITTI and Boreas show strong performance across seasons, weather, and day/night conditions, outperforming prior CMPR baselines.
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
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
We present FoundationGeo, a two-stage framework that explicitly bridges relative and metric prediction via spatial calibration and principled data design. Stage 1 learns a high-fidelity, affine-invariant geometry model by initializing with DINOv3 and training on a curated 10.
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:2609.09394v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recovering metric 3D geometry from monocular images is a fundamental computer vision task, yet current methods remain heavily fragmented by fixed camer...
By Botao Ye, Marc Pollefeys, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Abhijit Kundu