检测小尺寸和远距离目标对于目标检测器仍然具有挑战性，这归因于尺度变化、低分辨率和背景杂乱。安全关键应用需要可靠地检测这些目标以确保安全规划。深度信息可以提高检测性能，但现有方法需要复杂的、特定于模型的架构修改。我们提供了深度检测关系的理论分析后，紧接着进行了实证研究。一起，它们解释了深度如何导致系统性能下降以及为什么基于深度的监督可以缓解这种情况。我们引入了DepthPrior，一个利用深度作为先验知识而不是作为融合特征的框架，提供可比的收益而不修改检测器架构。DepthPrior由训练期间的基于深度的损失加权（DLW）和基于深度的损失分层（DLS）以及推理期间的基于深度的置信度阈值（DCT）组成。唯一额外的开销是初始深度估计的成本。在四个基准（KITTI、MS COCO、VisDrone、SUN RGB-D）和两个检测器（YOLOv11、EfficientDet）上的实验展示了DepthPrior的有效性，实现了小目标的mAP_S最高提升达+9%和mAR_S最高提升达+7%，推理恢复率高达95:1（真 vs 假检测）。DepthPrior在不增加额外传感器、架构修改或性能成本的情况下提供了这些好处。代码可在https://github.com/mos-ks/DepthPrior上获得。
英文摘要：
Detecting small and distant objects remains challenging for object detectors due to scale variation, low resolution, and background clutter. Safety-critical applications require reliable detection of these objects for safe planning. Depth information can improve detection, but existing approaches require complex, model-specific architectural modifications. We provide a theoretical analysis followed by an empirical investigation of the depth-detection relationship. Together, they explain how depth causes systematic performance degradation and why depth-informed supervision mitigates it. We introduce DepthPrior, a framework that uses depth as prior knowledge rather than as a fused feature, providing comparable benefits without modifying detector architectures. DepthPrior consists of Depth-Based Loss Weighting (DLW) and Depth-Based Loss Stratification (DLS) during training, and Depth-Aware Confidence Thresholding (DCT) during inference. The only overhead is the initial cost of depth estimation. Experiments across four benchmarks (KITTI, MS COCO, VisDrone, SUN RGB-D) and two detectors (YOLOv11, EfficientDet) demonstrate the effectiveness of DepthPrior, achieving up to +9% mAP$_S$ and +7% mAR$_S$ for small objects, with inference recovery rates as high as 95:1 (true vs. false detections). DepthPrior offers these benefits without additional sensors, architectural changes, or performance costs. Code is available at https://github.com/mos-ks/DepthPrior.
High-Precision Dichotomous Image Segmentation via Depth Integrity-Prior and Fine-Grained Patch Strategy
College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）；National Key Lab of Fundamental Science on Synthetic Vision, Sichuan University（合成视觉基础科学国家实验室）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University（浙江大学上海高等研究院）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）
Monocular 3D object detection has attracted great attention for its advantages in simplicity and cost. Due to the ill-posed 2D to 3D mapping essence from the monocular imaging process, monocular 3D object detection suffers from inaccurate depth estimation and thus has poor 3D detection results. To alleviate this problem, we propose to introduce the ground plane as a prior in the monocular 3d object detection. The ground plane prior serves as an additional geometric condition to the ill-posed mapping and an extra source in depth estimation. In this way, we can get a more accurate depth estimati…
Modern deep learning-based 3D pose estimation approaches require plenty of 3D pose annotations. However, existing 3D datasets lack diversity, which limits the performance of current methods and their generalization ability. Although existing methods utilize 2D pose annotations to help 3D pose estimation, they mainly focus on extracting 2D structural constraints from 2D poses, ignoring the 3D information hidden in the images. In this paper, we propose a novel method to extract weak 3D information directly from 2D images without 3D pose supervision. Firstly, we utilize 2D pose annotations and pe…
Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院）
Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown outstanding performance in many computer vision tasks including salient object detection. However, there still remains two issues needed to be addressed in deep learning based saliency detection. One is the lack of tremendous amount of annotated data to train a network. The other is the lack of robustness for extracting salient objects in images containing complex scenes. In this paper, we present a new architecture$ - $PDNet, a robust prior-model guided depth-enhanced network for RGB-D salient object detection. In contrast to existing work…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Recent work has shown that the structure of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) induces a strong prior that favors natural images. This prior, known as a deep image prior (DIP), is an effective regularizer in inverse problems such as image denoising and inpainting. We extend the concept of the DIP to depth images. Given color images and noisy and incomplete target depth maps, we optimize a randomly-initialized CNN model to reconstruct a depth map restored by virtue of using the CNN network structure as a prior combined with a view-constrained photo-consistency loss. This loss is computed usin…
Digging into Depth Priors for Outdoor Neural Radiance Fields
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
Depth cameras are a prominent perception system for robotics, especially when operating in natural unstructured environments. Industrial applications, however, typically involve reflective objects under harsh lighting conditions, a challenging scenario for depth cameras, as it induces numerous reflections and deflections, leading to loss of robustness and deteriorated accuracy. Here, we developed a deep model to correct the depth channel in RGBD images, aiming to restore the depth information to the required accuracy. To train the model, we created a novel industrial dataset that we now presen…
Monocular depth estimation has been extensively explored based on deep learning, yet its accuracy and generalization ability still lag far behind the stereo-based methods. To tackle this, a few recent studies have proposed to supervise the monocular depth estimation network by distilling disparity maps as proxy ground-truths. However, these studies naively distill the stereo knowledge without considering the comparative advantages of stereo-based and monocular depth estimation methods. In this paper, we propose to selectively distill the disparity maps for more reliable proxy supervision. Spec…
Key Laboratory for Ubiquitous Network and Service Software of Liaoning Province（辽宁省泛在网络与服务软件重点实验室）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Existing color-guided depth super-resolution (DSR) approaches require paired RGB-D data as training samples where the RGB image is used as structural guidance to recover the degraded depth map due to their geometrical similarity. However, the paired data may be limited or expensive to be collected in actual testing environment. Therefore, we explore for the first time to learn the cross-modality knowledge at training stage, where both RGB and depth modalities are available, but test on the target dataset, where only single depth modality exists. Our key idea is to distill the knowledge of scen…
Pose-Free Omnidirectional Gaussian Splatting for 360-Degree Videos with Consistent Depth Priors
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；Air Force Engineering University（空军工程大学）
PCA Lab, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China（南京理工大学科学与工程学院实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of California, USA, and Yonsei University, South Korea（美国加州大学和韩国延世大学）；PCA Lab, Nanjing University, China（南京大学实验室）
Scale-invariant and View-relational Representation Learning for Full Surround Monocular Depth
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST)（电子工程与计算机科学系，大邱庆北科学技术大学）；Department of Autonomous Driving Perception Technology Vanguard Team, Hyundai Motor Company（自动驾驶感知技术先锋团队，现代汽车公司）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Neural radiance fields (NeRF) encode a scene into a neural representation that enables photo-realistic rendering of novel views. However, a successful reconstruction from RGB images requires a large number of input views taken under static conditions - typically up to a few hundred images for room-size scenes. Our method aims to synthesize novel views of whole rooms from an order of magnitude fewer images. To this end, we leverage dense depth priors in order to constrain the NeRF optimization. First, we take advantage of the sparse depth data that is freely available from the structure from mo…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Huawei Technologies Ireland（华为技术爱尔兰公司）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）
Nowadays, the majority of state of the art monocular depth estimation techniques are based on supervised deep learning models. However, collecting RGB images with associated depth maps is a very time consuming procedure. Therefore, recent works have proposed deep architectures for addressing the monocular depth prediction task as a reconstruction problem, thus avoiding the need of collecting ground-truth depth. Following these works, we propose a novel self-supervised deep model for estimating depth maps. Our framework exploits two main strategies: refinement via cycle-inconsistency and distil…
School of Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳）理工学院）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院（社会））
Unsupervised learning of depth from indoor monocular videos is challenging as the artificial environment contains many textureless regions. Fortunately, the indoor scenes are full of specific structures, such as planes and lines, which should help guide unsupervised depth learning. This paper proposes PLNet that leverages the plane and line priors to enhance the depth estimation. We first represent the scene geometry using local planar coefficients and impose the smoothness constraint on the representation. Moreover, we enforce the planar and linear consistency by randomly selecting some sets …
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian Center for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
We present ``just-in-time reconstruction" as real-time image-guided inpainting of a map with arbitrary scale and sparsity to generate a fully dense depth map for the image. In particular, our goal is to inpaint a sparse map --- obtained from either a monocular visual SLAM system or a sparse sensor --- using a single-view depth prediction network as a virtual depth sensor. We adopt a fairly standard approach to data fusion, to produce a fused depth map by performing inference over a novel fully-connected Conditional Random Field (CRF) which is parameterized by the input depth maps and their pix…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Despite the recent advancement of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in learning 3D-aware image synthesis from 2D data, existing methods fail to model indoor scenes due to the large diversity of room layouts and the objects inside. We argue that indoor scenes do not have a shared intrinsic structure, and hence only using 2D images cannot adequately guide the model with the 3D geometry. In this work, we fill in this gap by introducing depth as a 3D prior. Compared with other 3D data formats, depth better fits the convolution-based generation mechanism and is more easily accessible in practi…
Synthetic Data Generation for Emotional Depth Faces: Optimizing Conditional DCGANs via Genetic Algorithms in the Latent Space and Stabilizing Training with Knowledge Distillation
Cyrus Intelligence Research Ltd（居鲁士智能研究有限公司）；Pars AI
Depth estimation from a single image represents a fascinating, yet challenging problem with countless applications. Recent works proved that this task could be learned without direct supervision from ground truth labels leveraging image synthesis on sequences or stereo pairs. Focusing on this second case, in this paper we leverage stereo matching in order to improve monocular depth estimation. To this aim we propose monoResMatch, a novel deep architecture designed to infer depth from a single input image by synthesizing features from a different point of view, horizontally aligned with the inp…
Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院微电子研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Although existing monocular depth estimation methods have made great progress, predicting an accurate absolute depth map from a single image is still challenging due to the limited modeling capacity of networks and the scale ambiguity issue. In this paper, we introduce a fully Visual Attention-based Depth (VADepth) network, where spatial attention and channel attention are applied to all stages. By continuously extracting the dependencies of features along the spatial and channel dimensions over a long distance, VADepth network can effectively preserve important details and suppress interferin…
InFusion: Inpainting 3D Gaussians via Learning Depth Completion from Diffusion Prior
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）
Patch-based stereo is nowadays a commonly used image-based technique for dense 3D reconstruction in large scale multi-view applications. The typical steps of such a pipeline can be summarized in stereo pair selection, depth map computation, depth map refinement and, finally, fusion in order to generate a complete and accurate representation of the scene in 3D. In this study, we aim to support the standard dense 3D reconstruction of scenes as implemented in the open source library OpenMVS by using semantic priors. To this end, during the depth map fusion step, along with the depth consistency c…
Any to Full: Prompting Depth Anything for Depth Completion in One Stage
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；JD Logistics（京东物流）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
Iris: Bringing Real-World Priors into Diffusion Model for Monocular Depth Estimation
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Manufacturing of Advanced Construction Machinery（先进施工机械智能制造国家重点实验室）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University（成均馆大学电子与计算机工程系）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校海伦·威尔斯神经科学研究所）；School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校视光学院）；Department of EECS, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校电气工程与计算机科学系计算机科学部）
This paper introduces a new method for learning and inferring sparse representations of depth (disparity) maps. The proposed algorithm relaxes the usual assumption of the stationary noise model in sparse coding. This enables learning from data corrupted with spatially varying noise or uncertainty, typically obtained by laser range scanners or structured light depth cameras. Sparse representations are learned from the Middlebury database disparity maps and then exploited in a two-layer graphical model for inferring depth from stereo, by including a sparsity prior on the learned features. Since …
Language as Prior, Vision as Calibration: Metric Scale Recovery for Monocular Depth Estimation
Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, Anhui, China（合肥工业大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei, Anhui, China（人工智能研究所）；University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China（中国科学技术大学）
