Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

MooMIns -- Monocular 3D Reconstruction and Object Pose Estimation from Multiple Instances

Simultaneous 3D reconstruction and 6D object pose estimation from a single monocular image is an inherently ill-posed problem. In industrial settings, however, multiple instances of an object are often randomly arranged in bins, implicitly providing several views of the same object within a single image. We show that this implicit multi-view geometry can be exploited to simultaneously reconstruct the object in 3D and estimate the 6D pose of each visible object instance. We present MooMIns, a new Gaussian-splatting-based approach that inverts the original Gaussian splatting formulation: instead of rendering a single scene from multiple cameras, we render multiple object instances from a single camera. Our method is initialized with SAM3 instance segmentation masks and a modified Structure from Motion (SfM) pipeline. In contrast to learned monocular depth estimation, we perform true geometry-based reconstruction from image evidence, avoiding hallucinations caused by training data priors. We evaluate MooMIns on synthetic and real bin-picking scenarios, and demonstrate accurate reconstruction of previously unseen objects as well as reliable pose estimation of individual instance

DepthMaster: Unified Monocular Depth Estimation for Perspective and Panoramic Images

While monocular depth estimation has achieved significant progress, achieving generalized metric depth estimation for both narrow field-of-view (FoV) perspectives and $360^\circ$ panoramas remains an unsolved challenge. Existing methods are often tailored to specific camera types and struggle to produce accurate metric depth that generalizes across diverse settings. This limitation stems from two key challenges: the inherent geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic cameras, and the scarcity of panoramic training data with metric annotations. In this work, we introduce DepthMaster, a unified metric depth estimation framework. Rather than employing specialized networks to learn spherical distortions, we reformulate the problem by decomposing panoramic images into overlapping perspective patches. Crucially, distinct from prior projection-based methods that rely on ad-hoc architectural modifications to handle boundaries, we introduce a novel Correspondence Consistency Loss (CCL) and inject virtual projection cameras as geometric priors, allowing us to seamlessly stitch the patches while avoiding specialized operators and keeping the backbone largely compatible with standard Transformer designs. This strategy also resolves the geometric differences by unifying all inputs into a canonical perspective representation, and effectively circumvents data scarcity by directly unlocking powerful metric priors from vast perspective datasets. Trained on a mixed dataset that contains only one panorama dataset, DepthMaster achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 13 diverse datasets, outperforming not only universal methods but also leading specialist models in both perspective and panoramic domains.

Modality Forcing for Scalable Spatial Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) models contain rich spatial priors. Synthesizing photorealistic, cluttered scenes requires an understanding of geometry, including perspective and relative scale. Prior works adapt T2I models to leverage this prior for depth prediction, but they require dense depth data and involve complex recipes. We propose Modality Forcing, a simple, scalable post-training recipe for joint image-depth generation using a single DiT trained on sparse depth data. Modality Forcing enables conditional and joint generation of image and depth in any permutation by assigning separate noise levels per modality. Per-modality decoders let us train on sparse, real-world depth and achieve strong, generalizable depth prediction. We further show that Modality Forcing inherits the scalability of T2I pre-training: by training a set of T2I models from scratch (370M to 3.3B parameters), we find that larger models trained on more image data produce more accurate depth. Our strongest model is competitive with state-of-the-art monocular depth estimators and reduces AbsRel by 57% relative to existing joint image-depth generative models. These results provide strong evidence that image generation is a scalable pre-training objective for spatial perception. https://modality-forcing.github.io/

Leveraging Metric Depth for Relative Depth Prediction

We present our solution to the 2025 SoccerNet Monocular Depth Estimation Competition Challenge. Predicting the relative depth in football scenarios is challenging, especially with only thousands of training samples available. To address this issue, our method leverages the powerful zero-shot capabilities of models pretrained on large-scale datasets to learn metric depth for effective relative depth prediction, achieving a score of $2.68 \times 10^{-3}$ on the challenge set.

Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer for Spacecraft 6D Pose Estimation

Vision sensors provide a lightweight solution for spacecraft proximity operations, but monocular spacecraft 6D pose estimation remains difficult under illumination variation, specular reflection, shadowing, weak texture, and background interference. These factors make local visual evidence spatially unreliable and can destabilize pose regression. This article proposes a Precision-Aware Illumination-Disentangled Vision Transformer (PAID-ViT) for robust spacecraft pose estimation.The proposed model separates pose-relevant structure tokens from illumination-sensitive appearance tokens, estimates patch reliability before pose aggregation, and uses foreground mask supervision to preserve silhouette cues. A parameter-free geometric recovery module converts normalized crop coordinates, log-depth, and a continuous 6D rotation representation into camera-frame rotation and translation. Experiments on SPEED+ V2, the SPEED+ validation/lightbox/sunlamp evaluation configuration used in this study, suggest that PAID-ViT reduces translation error and improves robustness in the challenging sunlamp domain, while ablation studies support the complementary roles of illumination disentanglement, reliability-aware token aggregation, mask supervision, and training-side regularization.

Planar-Sector LOS Guidance for Interception of Agile Targets with Lifting-Wing Quadcopters

Autonomous visual interception of agile aerial targets is challenging due to unpredictable target motion, limited sensing, and the strong coupling between target visibility and interceptor maneuverability. Most existing strapdown-camera interception methods preserve visibility using conic line-of-sight (LOS) constraints that keep the target near the image center. While safe, such symmetric constraints unnecessarily restrict maneuverability and can significantly reduce the usable thrust for pursuit. Motivated by the observation that aggressive FPV pilots do not maintain equal visibility margins in all image directions, this paper proposes a Planar-Sector Line-of-Sight (PS-LOS) guidance framework for autonomous interception using a lifting-wing quadcopter equipped with only a strapdown monocular camera. PS-LOS tightly constrains lateral image error while relaxing longitudinal image error within a safe field-of-view margin, preserving visibility while releasing maneuverability for acceleration-intensive pursuit. Under the lifting-wing quadcopter model, PS-LOS provides nearly 50% more available thrust near the LOS direction than conventional conic LOS constraints. To realize LOS-only interception without direct depth measurements, a delay-compensated state-estimation framework and a nonlinear guidance-and-control architecture are developed for lifting-wing quadcopters. Extensive outdoor flight experiments demonstrate autonomous interception of agile targets exhibiting large-amplitude, high-frequency, and unpredictable motion under real wind disturbances. The proposed system achieves successful interceptions at ranges up to 138 m while maintaining continuous visual tracking throughout the engagement. The results validate PS-LOS as a visibility-preserving, maneuverability-aware guidance framework for long-range visual interception of agile aerial targets.

Autonomous FPV Flight with Translational Optical Flow and Uncertainty Mask

Autonomous FPV quadrotor flight in complex environments using a monocular RGB camera as the sole exteroceptive sensor remains a fundamental challenge. Recent research has shown that using optical flow as the input of a neural network can achieve end-to-end autonomous flight in cluttered scenes. However, extracting the most relevant information from the flow estimation is the key bottleneck limiting agility and robustness. Existing methods struggle to disentangle obstacle-induced optical flow from the ego-motion background flow and suffer from low signal-to-noise ratios near the focus of expansion (FoE). To address these issues, we decompose the optical flow into translational and rotational components and utilize only the translational flow, which captures scene geometry and depth cues. In addition, we introduce an uncertainty mask derived from inconsistencies between forward and backward flow estimates. This mask highlights obstacle structures, including those within the FoE region. Both cues are fed to a control policy trained in a differentiable simulation framework, which enables efficient first-order optimization across perception and control. We validate our approach through extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world forest environments. The proposed system achieves robust flight at speeds of up to 13.91 m/s in simulation and 11.79 m/s in real-world tests, with a 93.3\% success rate over 30 real-world trials, nearly doubling the previously reported 6 m/s real-world speed of the monocular-RGB optical-flow UAV obstacle avoidance system.

SA4Depth: Consistent Pose-Depth Scale Alignment for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised depth estimation from monocular sequences relies on the joint learning of a depth and a pose network. Despite abundant research done to improve the depth network, efforts on the pose remain limited. In this context, even when depth is estimated up to scale, we highlight the importance of the alignment between the scene scales estimated by the pose and depth nets. Then, we introduce SA4Depth, an approach to improve this alignment and boost the depth predictions while keeping the inference time unchanged. Our proposed method uses the depth estimated during training to reproject learnable visual features across consecutive frames and refine the pose estimates by reducing feature alignment residuals. With our method, the estimated scene scales by the separate depth and pose networks are aligned, and the prediction scale consistency is improved across different sequences. Our differentiable refinement integrates seamlessly into existing self-supervised pipelines and substantially improves their depth estimates. We demonstrate this with extensive experiments both outdoors and indoors on KITTI, Cityscapes, and NYUv2. Additionally, results on KITTI Odometry confirm the effectiveness of our pose refinement. Our code is available at https://github.com/Runningchauncey/SA4Depth .

Honey, I Shrunk the Arc de Triomphe!

Metric scale monocular geometry estimation has seen significant progress through large-scale data aggregation, yet current foundation models suffer from a persistent ''scale-collapse'' phenomenon: distant landmarks and vast landscapes are metrically underestimated. We hypothesize that this performance gap stems from a training data bottleneck, where existing metric-scale datasets are hardware-constrained to homogenous vehicle-captured LiDAR or short-range indoor scans, or consist of synthetic data that lacks the semantic complexity of the physical world. To bridge this gap, we curate a new metrically-grounded, in-the-wild dataset that we call MetricScenes, gathered from a variety of sources including Internet photo collections and stereo imagery. We estimate camera poses and initial depth maps for each scene using off-the-shelf methods, and recover absolute scale from geo-tagged metadata as well as known stereo camera baselines. We also improve the quality of depth maps derived from MetricScenes via a new two-stage Poisson completion method. Fine-tuning MoGe-2 on our dataset significantly mitigates scale-collapse and achieves superior metric accuracy in unconstrained, open-domain scenes while maintaining state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks.