Extrapolation Matters: Sparse-Only Depth Completion Beyond LiDAR Coverage

Maximilian Jansen, Gasser Elazab, Praveen Kulkarni

Extrapolation beyond LiDAR coverage is an important yet under-evaluated challenge of depth completion. In real camera--LiDAR systems, partial sensor overlap, occlusions, and limited field coverage often leave large image regions weakly observed or completely unobserved by LiDAR. Thus, we investigate depth completion in this beyond-coverage regime using only sparse supervision from raw single-sweep LiDAR, without dense depth labels, LiDAR accumulation, or pseudo-LiDAR generation. Our approach leverages a frozen monocular depth foundation model, lightweight per-frame alignment to sparse LiDAR geometry, and a refinement module that fuses the aligned prior with sparse LiDAR anchors to predict dense metric depth. To regularize learning under raw sparse supervision, we introduce a high-frequency normal-consistency loss defined as the image-space gradient of the per-pixel normal cosine discrepancy. This term penalizes spatial variation in scalar angular error; it does not directly match changes in neighboring normal vectors. We further introduce an evaluation protocol that explicitly separates LiDAR-supported and beyond-coverage regions, revealing extrapolative behavior that…