monocular

Definition

From a single camera, with no stereo baseline and no depth sensor. Monocular depth estimation and monocular reconstruction are ill-posed in principle — absolute scale is unrecoverable from one viewpoint — so these methods lean on learned priors to resolve the ambiguity. The word is worth noticing because it tells you the hard constraint the paper accepted, and hence why its results are compared against stereo or LiDAR baselines.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: Marigold V2 — Turning an Image Editor Into a State-of-the-Art Depth Estimator on One 32GB GPUMarigold V2: Revisiting Diffusion Transformers for Monocular Depth Estimation
• 4DAnyone, Explained — Turning One Casual Video Into a 4D Person4DAnyone: Create Anyone in 4D from a Casual Monocular Video