Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) has garnered attention in recent years due to its independence from ground truth. However, most existing models are limited to a single scale and exhibit considerable performance degradation in complex driving environments.
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
HENet++ is a unified framework that combines a hybrid image encoding strategy—using a large encoder for short‑term frames and a lightweight encoder for long‑term temporal context—to balance accuracy and efficiency in 3D perception for autonomous driving. It jointly extracts dense background and sparse foreground features, enabling task‑specific representations that reduce cumulative errors and enrich downstream prediction and planning modules. The approach supports diverse 3D feature extraction pipelines, multi‑modal inputs (camera and radar), and achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on nuScenes and NAVSIM benchmarks, including the lowest collision rate on nuScenes planning.
By Zhongyu Xia, Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang
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
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