Marigold V2: Revisiting Diffusion Transformers for Monocular Depth Estimation
Igor Pavlovic, Thiemo Wandel, Anton Obukhov, Luca Bartolomei, Andrey Davydov, Fabio Tosi, Matteo Poggi, Sabine Süsstrunk, Dengxin Dai
This paper improves monocular depth estimation models by repurposing image generation models, using a diffusion transformer architecture, to produce sharper and more detailed depth maps that generalize well to out-of-distribution inputs. Practitioners might care about this research because it could lead to better performance in applications such as scene reconstruction and computational photography.
Abstract
Monocular depth estimation is a ubiquitous yet highly ill-posed computer vision task, with downstream applications in scene reconstruction, computational photography, and robotics, among others. Despite the field's maturity, recent models still struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution inputs and to produce sharp and detailed depth maps. In this paper, we revisit Marigold, a set of techniques for repurposing modern image generation and editing models, powered by the diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture, into state-of-the-art monocular depth estimators. Our recipes target single-step inference from pretrained multi-step flow-matching models, with quantization where needed, preserving model capacity while remaining cheap to run. We analyze the artifacts of naive training and identify two effective remedies: aligning the model's internal representations with semantic features extracted from ground-truth, and adopting a 2-stage fine-tuning protocol built around a novel Sinkhorn-based loss. The results are crisper, cleaner depth maps that generalize well out-of-distribution, with 16-26% improvement in AbsRel over the previous best on KITTI and ETH3D. Qualitatively, our model resolves fur, foliage, and hair-thin edges that have eluded prior models. Furthermore, Marigold V2 achieves state-of-the-art results when applied to other dense regression tasks, such as surface normals estimation and intrinsic image decomposition. Project website: https://hf.co/spaces/huawei-bayerlab/marigold-v2-web