Distill Any Depth Small - Transformers Version

Introduction

We present Distill-Any-Depth, a new SOTA monocular depth estimation model trained with our proposed knowledge distillation algorithms. It was introduced in the paper Distill Any Depth: Distillation Creates a Stronger Monocular Depth Estimator.

This model checkpoint is compatible with the transformers library.

Online demo.

How to use

Here is how to use this model to perform zero-shot depth estimation:

from transformers import pipeline
from PIL import Image
import requests
# load pipe
pipe = pipeline(task="depth-estimation", model="xingyang1/Distill-Any-Depth-Small-hf")
# load image
url = 'http://images.cocodataset.org/val2017/000000039769.jpg'
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)
# inference
depth = pipe(image)["depth"]

Alternatively, you can use the model and processor classes:

from transformers import AutoImageProcessor, AutoModelForDepthEstimation
import torch
import numpy as np
from PIL import Image
import requests

url = "http://images.cocodataset.org/val2017/000000039769.jpg"
image = Image.open(requests.get(url, stream=True).raw)

image_processor = AutoImageProcessor.from_pretrained("xingyang1/Distill-Any-Depth-Small-hf")
model = AutoModelForDepthEstimation.from_pretrained("xingyang1/Distill-Any-Depth-Small-hf")

# prepare image for the model
inputs = image_processor(images=image, return_tensors="pt")

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)

# interpolate to original size and visualize the prediction
post_processed_output = image_processor.post_process_depth_estimation(
    outputs,
    target_sizes=[(image.height, image.width)],
)

predicted_depth = post_processed_output[0]["predicted_depth"]
depth = (predicted_depth - predicted_depth.min()) / (predicted_depth.max() - predicted_depth.min())
depth = depth.detach().cpu().numpy() * 255
depth = Image.fromarray(depth.astype("uint8"))
)

If you find this project useful, please consider citing:

@article{he2025distill,
  title   = {Distill Any Depth: Distillation Creates a Stronger Monocular Depth Estimator},
  author  = {Xiankang He and Dongyan Guo and Hongji Li and Ruibo Li and Ying Cui and Chi Zhang},
  year    = {2025},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv: 2502.19204}
}

Model Card Author

Parteek Kamboj