PRIDEV: A Plug-and-Play Refinement for Improved Depth Estimation in Videos

Abstract

Monocular video depth estimation is a key challenge in computer vision, highlighting its importance in visual understanding. Monocular depth estimation models trained on single images achieve impressive results on individual frames but often lack temporal consistency when applied to videos, leading to flickering and artifacts. Current video depth estimation methods often rely on additional optical flow or camera poses, which are limited by their accuracy, complex design, and lack robustness. Specially, we propose a plug-and-play method that seamlessly transfers the robustness of image depth estimation to video depth estimation. By leveraging powerful priors from image depth estimation, our method enhances the performance of video depth estimation without requiring additional conditional inputs or extensive pretraining on large and expensive video datasets. We introduce the Temporal Depth Stabilization Module (TDSM), which can seamlessly inflate an image monocular depth estimation model into a video depth estimation model, enabling unified modeling of depth across video sequences and capturing the temporal cues in video. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method across various datasets (e.g., normal and challenging conditions) and different backbones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our simple and effective method significantly improves monocular depth estimation networks, achieving new state-of-the-art accuracy in both spatial and temporal dimensions.