Zero-shot Depth Completion via Test-time Alignment with Affine-invariant Depth Priors

AAAI 2025
1Grad. School of AI, POSTECH 2Dept. of Electrical Engineering, POSTECH 1Institute for Convergence Research and Education in Advanced Technology, Yonsei University

Abstract

Depth completion, predicting dense depth maps from sparse depth measurements, is an ill-posed problem requiring prior knowledge. Recent methods adopt learning-based approaches to implicitly capture priors, but the priors primarily fit in- domain data and do not generalize well to out-of-domain scenarios. To address this, we propose a zero-shot depth completion method composed of an affine-invariant depth diffusion model and test-time alignment. We use pre-trained depth diffusion models as depth prior knowledge, which implicitly understand how to fill in depth for scenes. Our approach aligns the affine-invariant depth prior with metric-scale sparse measurements, enforcing them as hard constraints via an optimization loop at test-time. Our zero-shot depth completion method demonstrates generalization across various domain datasets, achieving up to a 21% average performance improvement over the previous state-of-the-art methods while enhancing spatial understanding by sharpening scene details. We demonstrate that aligning a monocular affine-invariant depth prior with sparse metric measurements is a sufficient strategy to achieve domain-generalizable depth completion without relying on extensive training datasets.