CDPR: Cross-modal Diffusion with Polarization for Reliable Monocular Depth Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CDPR, a diffusion-based framework that combines RGB and polarization data to improve monocular depth estimation, especially in challenging visual conditions.

Contribution

It integrates polarization priors into a diffusion model using a shared latent space and confidence-aware fusion, enhancing robustness over RGB-only methods.

Findings

Outperforms RGB-only baselines in challenging regions

Effective in handling reflective and transparent surfaces

Generalizes to surface normal prediction with minimal changes

Abstract

Monocular depth estimation is a fundamental yet challenging task in computer vision, especially under complex conditions such as textureless surfaces, transparency, and specular reflections. Recent diffusion-based approaches have significantly advanced performance by reformulating depth prediction as a denoising process in the latent space. However, existing methods rely solely on RGB inputs, which often lack sufficient cues in challenging regions. In this work, we present CDPR - Cross-modal Diffusion with Polarization for Reliable Monocular Depth Estimation - a novel diffusion-based framework that integrates physically grounded polarization priors to enhance estimation robustness. Specifically, we encode both RGB and polarization (AoLP/DoLP) images into a shared latent space via a pre-trained Variational Autoencoder (VAE), and dynamically fuse multi-modal information through a learnable confidence-aware gating mechanism. This fusion module adaptively suppresses noisy signals in polarization inputs while preserving informative cues, particularly around reflective or transparent surfaces, and provides the integrated latent representation for subsequent monocular depth estimation. Beyond depth estimation, we further verify that our framework can be easily generalized to surface normal prediction with minimal modification, showcasing its scalability to general polarization-guided dense prediction tasks. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate that CDPR significantly outperforms RGB-only baselines in challenging regions while maintaining competitive performance in standard scenes.