FlexDepth is a family of self-supervised monocular depth estimation models designed for robust driving perception. It introduces a Scale-Driven Decoder (SDD) with adaptive component selection, enabling a single architecture to span five model scales — from ultra-lightweight (1.5M params, 0.7 GFLOPs) to high-accuracy (32.3M params, 24.6 GFLOPs).
Key Features
Five model scales: Nano (N), Small (S), Medium (M), Large (L), X-Large (X)
Scale-Driven Decoder (SDD): Adaptive component selection based on model scale
High-Efficiency Bottleneck (HEB): For small models (N, S) — maximizes efficiency
High-Performance Bottleneck (HPB): For large models (M, L, X) — maximizes accuracy
Dynamic upsampling: Sharper depth boundaries via learned upsampling
Two-stage static-dynamic decoupled training: Handles dynamic scenes in driving scenarios
YOLO11-based encoder: Leverages rich visual representations from YOLO segmentation pretraining
On the KITTI Eigen benchmark with dense ground truth and least-squares alignment:
Method
Type
Params
GFLOPs
Resolution
Abs Rel ↓
δ<1.25 ↑
DA2 (ViT-L)
Zero-Shot
335M
1947
1722×518
0.070
0.956
DA2 (ViT-S)
Zero-Shot
25M
137
1722×518
0.077
0.944
DA2 (ViT-L)
Zero-Shot
335M
276
644×196
0.092
0.915
DA2 (ViT-S)
Zero-Shot
25M
19
644×196
0.110
0.881
Flex-X-Large
Self-Supervised
32M
25
640×192
0.063
0.952
FlexDepth achieves comparable or better accuracy than Depth Anything V2 with ~13× fewer parameters and ~78× fewer GFLOPs at similar resolution.
Citation
bibtex
1@misc{zhu2026robustdrivingperceptionflexible,
2 title={Towards Robust Driving Perception: A Flexible Scale-Driven Family for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation},
3 author={Zhaowen Zhu and Li Zhang and Yujie Chen and Tian Zhang and Yingjie Wang and Mingxia Zhan},
4 year={2026},
5 eprint={2607.00736},
6 archivePrefix={arXiv},
7 primaryClass={cs.CV},
8 url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00736}
9}
Acknowledgment
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62332016.