How Should One Evaluate Monocular Depth Estimation?

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19814v2
• Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:33:49 GMT
• Title: How Should One Evaluate Monocular Depth Estimation?
• Authors: Siyang Wu, Jack Nugent, Willow Yang, Jia Deng,
• Abstract summary: This paper contributes a novel, quantitative analysis of existing metrics in terms of their sensitivity to various types of perturbations of ground truth.<n>We introduce a new metric based on relative surface normals, along with new depth visualization tools and a principled method to create composite metrics with better human alignment.
• Score: 14.688133150051213
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Monocular depth estimation is an important task with rapid progress, but how to evaluate it remains an open question, as evidenced by a lack of standardization in existing literature and a large selection of evaluation metrics whose trade-offs and behaviors are not well understood. This paper contributes a novel, quantitative analysis of existing metrics in terms of their sensitivity to various types of perturbations of ground truth, emphasizing comparison to human judgment. Our analysis reveals that existing metrics are severely under-sensitive to curvature perturbation such as making flat surfaces wavy. To remedy this, we introduce a new metric based on relative surface normals, along with new depth visualization tools and a principled method to create composite metrics with better human alignment. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/princeton-vl/evalmde.

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