Distill Any Depth: Distillation Creates a Stronger Monocular Depth
  Estimator
Authors: name: Xiankang He; name: Dongyan Guo; name: Hongji Li; name: Ruibo Li; name: Ying Cui; name: Chi Zhang
Published: 2025-02-26 15:10:05

Abstract: Monocular depth estimation (MDE) aims to predict scene depth from a single
RGB image and plays a crucial role in 3D scene understanding. Recent advances
in zero-shot MDE leverage normalized depth representations and
distillation-based learning to improve generalization across diverse scenes.
However, current depth normalization methods for distillation, relying on
global normalization, can amplify noisy pseudo-labels, reducing distillation
effectiveness. In this paper, we systematically analyze the impact of different
depth normalization strategies on pseudo-label distillation. Based on our
findings, we propose Cross-Context Distillation, which integrates global and
local depth cues to enhance pseudo-label quality. Additionally, we introduce a
multi-teacher distillation framework that leverages complementary strengths of
different depth estimation models, leading to more robust and accurate depth
predictions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our
approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, both
quantitatively and qualitatively.