DiffusionDepth: Diffusion Denoising Approach for Monocular Depth Estimation

Yiqun Duan*, Xianda Guo*, Zheng Zhu ;

"Monocular depth estimation is a challenging task that predicts the pixel-wise depth from a single 2D image. Current methods typically model this problem as a regression or classification task. We propose DiffusionDepth, a new approach that reformulates monocular depth estimation as a denoising diffusion process. It learns an iterative denoising process to ‘denoise’ random depth distribution into a depth map with the guidance of monocular visual conditions. The process is performed in the latent space encoded by a dedicated depth encoder and decoder. Instead of diffusing ground truth (GT) depth, the model learns to reverse the process of diffusing the refined depth of itself into random depth distribution. This self-diffusion formulation overcomes the difficulty of applying generative models to sparse GT depth scenarios. The proposed approach benefits this task by refining depth estimation step by step, which is superior for generating accurate and highly detailed depth maps. Experimental results from both offline and online evaluations using the KITTI and NYU-Depth-V2 datasets indicate that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in both indoor and outdoor settings while maintaining a reasonable inference time. The codes 1 are available online. 1 https://github.com/duanyiqun/DiffusionDepth"