Distilling Monocular Foundation Model for Fine-grained Depth Completion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liang, Yingping, Hu, Yutao, Shao, Wenqi, Fu, Ying
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liang, Yingping
Hu, Yutao
Shao, Wenqi
Fu, Ying
author_facet Liang, Yingping
Hu, Yutao
Shao, Wenqi
Fu, Ying
contents Depth completion involves predicting dense depth maps from sparse LiDAR inputs. However, sparse depth annotations from sensors limit the availability of dense supervision, which is necessary for learning detailed geometric features. In this paper, we propose a two-stage knowledge distillation framework that leverages powerful monocular foundation models to provide dense supervision for depth completion. In the first stage, we introduce a pre-training strategy that generates diverse training data from natural images, which distills geometric knowledge to depth completion. Specifically, we simulate LiDAR scans by utilizing monocular depth and mesh reconstruction, thereby creating training data without requiring ground-truth depth. Besides, monocular depth estimation suffers from inherent scale ambiguity in real-world settings. To address this, in the second stage, we employ a scale- and shift-invariant loss (SSI Loss) to learn real-world scales when fine-tuning on real-world datasets. Our two-stage distillation framework enables depth completion models to harness the strengths of monocular foundation models. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained with our two-stage distillation framework achieve state-of-the-art performance, ranking \textbf{first place} on the KITTI benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/Sharpiless/DMD3C
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16970
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distilling Monocular Foundation Model for Fine-grained Depth Completion
Liang, Yingping
Hu, Yutao
Shao, Wenqi
Fu, Ying
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Depth completion involves predicting dense depth maps from sparse LiDAR inputs. However, sparse depth annotations from sensors limit the availability of dense supervision, which is necessary for learning detailed geometric features. In this paper, we propose a two-stage knowledge distillation framework that leverages powerful monocular foundation models to provide dense supervision for depth completion. In the first stage, we introduce a pre-training strategy that generates diverse training data from natural images, which distills geometric knowledge to depth completion. Specifically, we simulate LiDAR scans by utilizing monocular depth and mesh reconstruction, thereby creating training data without requiring ground-truth depth. Besides, monocular depth estimation suffers from inherent scale ambiguity in real-world settings. To address this, in the second stage, we employ a scale- and shift-invariant loss (SSI Loss) to learn real-world scales when fine-tuning on real-world datasets. Our two-stage distillation framework enables depth completion models to harness the strengths of monocular foundation models. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained with our two-stage distillation framework achieve state-of-the-art performance, ranking \textbf{first place} on the KITTI benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/Sharpiless/DMD3C
title Distilling Monocular Foundation Model for Fine-grained Depth Completion
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16970