EagleDepth: Efficient Fine-Grained Depth Estimation via Pixel Diffusion Decoder

Bowen Chai, Tianbao Zhang, Shuyu Wu, Dexin Zuo, Zhaoxin Fan +1

Recovering detailed geometry from high-resolution images is critical for precise perception of the surroundings and objects. However, existing methods which use latent-space modeling and VAE reconstruction can compromise geometric details. Furthermore, decoding from latent codes introduces substantial inference overhead. To address those issues, we present EagleDepth, an efficient framework for high-resolution monocular depth estimation that combines the geometric priors of latent diffusion with fine-grained pixel-space generation. Our key idea is to retain depth-aware latent representations as guidance while generating the final depth map directly in pixel space. We train the latent and pixel components sequentially: first, we fine-tune a pretrained latent diffusion model using paired RGB--depth supervision; then, we adapt a pretrained pixel diffusion decoder, PiD, to predict depth conditioned on the learned features. Training of the pixel component starts at 1024 resolution and continues across multiple resolutions up to 4K. The latent branch processes resized, lower-resolution RGB images, while the pixel branch generates depth at the target resolution, bypassing the original…