One Look is Enough: A Novel Seamless Patchwise Refinement for Zero-Shot Monocular Depth Estimation Models on High-Resolution Images

Zero-shot depth estimation (DE) models exhibit strong generalization performance as they are trained on large-scale datasets. However, existing models struggle with high-resolution images due to the discrepancy in image resolutions of training (with smaller resolutions) and inference (for high resolutions). Processing them at full resolution leads to decreased estimation accuracy on depth with tremendous memory consumption, while downsampling to the training resolution results in blurred edges in the estimated depth images. Prevailing high-resolution depth estimation methods adopt a patch-based approach, which introduces depth discontinuity issues when reassembling the estimated depth patches and results in test-time inefficiency. Additionally, to obtain fine-grained depth details, these methods rely on synthetic datasets due to the real-world sparse ground truth depth, leading to poor generalizability. To tackle these limitations, we propose Patch Refine Once (PRO), an efficient and generalizable tile-based framework. Our PRO consists of two key components: (i) Grouped Patch Consistency Training that enhances test-time efficiency while mitigating the depth discontinuity problem by jointly processing four overlapping patches and enforcing a consistency loss on their overlapping regions within a single backpropagation step, and (ii) Bias Free Masking that prevents the DE models from overfitting to dataset-specific biases, enabling better generalization to real-world datasets even after training on synthetic data. Zero-shot evaluation on Booster, ETH3D, Middlebury 2014, and NuScenes demonstrates into which our PRO can be well harmonized, making their DE capabilities still effective for the grid input of high-resolution images with little depth discontinuities at the grid boundaries. Our PRO runs fast at inference time.