Beyond Visual Ambiguity: Guiding Robust Monocular Depth Estimation in Challenging Scenarios via Detailed Long Captions

Engineering notes

Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of CapDepth, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving depth error reductions of 25.0% on non-Lambertian surfaces and 22.0% under adverse weather conditions.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) faces challenges with non-Lambertian surfaces and adverse weather conditions due to the visual ambiguities inherent in single-image limited information. Existing works address them in isolation via image inpainting or augmentation, yielding limited robustness gains. Language, as a powerful complementary modality to vision, is demonstrated to enhance the visual perception capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) via detailed long captions. However, prior language-integrated MDE methods fail to fully harness this potential due to short text input with limited information, coarse global text feature learning, and limited language guidance during depth decoding. To address these limitations, we propose CapDepth, a novel framework for robust MDE that leverages guidance from detailed long captions to alleviate visual ambiguities in both challenging scenarios. First, we design a detailed long caption input template that explicitly conveys rich spatial relationships among multiple atom sentences. Second, a dynamic caption encoder is introduced to extract fine-grained depth-relevant text features via progressive masked attention. Finally, we propose a text-adaptive decoder that guides enhanced depth decoding with text features via stable adaptive layer normalization. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of CapDepth, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving depth error reductions of 25.0% on non-Lambertian surfaces and 22.0% under adverse weather conditions.

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