PXDepth: Pixel-Space Modeling for Structure Preserving Monocular Depth Estimation

Abstract:Recent monocular depth estimators achieve strong zero-shot generalization, yet often struggle to preserve fine-grained structures and object boundaries. We attribute this limitation to the prevalent combination of large-patch ViT encoders and convolutional decoders, as coarse tokenization can weaken pixel-level cues that upsampling cannot fully recover. To address this issue, we propose PXDepth, a discriminative monocular depth model that separates global context modeling from pixel-level depth prediction. Specifically, a large-patch ViT captures global scene context, while a pixel-space predictor composed of Context-Modulated Pixel Transformer blocks maintains high-resolution spatial representations throughout depth estimation. This design preserves fine structures and sharp boundaries without sacrificing global depth consistency. Across diverse zero-shot benchmarks, PXDepth combines faithful local geometry with competitive global depth accuracy while remaining efficient at inference. Our code and model are available at this https URL.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Graphics (cs.GR)

arXiv:2608.16984 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2608.16984v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.16984 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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