Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data

Lihe Yang, Bingyi Kang, Zilong Huang, Xiaogang Xu, Jiashi Feng, Hengshuang Zhao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 10371-10381

This work presents Depth Anything a highly practical solution for robust monocular depth estimation. Without pursuing novel technical modules we aim to build a simple yet powerful foundation model dealing with any images under any circumstances. To this end we scale up the dataset by designing a data engine to collect and automatically annotate large-scale unlabeled data ( 62M) which significantly enlarges the data coverage and thus is able to reduce the generalization error. We investigate two simple yet effective strategies that make data scaling-up promising. First a more challenging optimization target is created by leveraging data augmentation tools. It compels the model to actively seek extra visual knowledge and acquire robust representations. Second an auxiliary supervision is developed to enforce the model to inherit rich semantic priors from pre-trained encoders. We evaluate its zero-shot capabilities extensively including six public datasets and randomly captured photos. It demonstrates impressive generalization ability. Further through fine-tuning it with metric depth information from NYUv2 and KITTI new SOTAs are set. Our better depth model also results in a better depth-conditioned ControlNet. Our models are released at https://github.com/LiheYoung/Depth-Anything.