CH3Depth: Efficient and Flexible Depth Foundation Model with Flow Matching

Depth estimation is a fundamental task in 3D vision. An ideal depth estimation model is expected to embrace meticulous detail, temporal consistency, and high efficiency. Although existing foundation models can perform well in certain specific aspects, most of them fall short of fulfilling all the above requirements simultaneously. In this paper, we present CH$_3$Depth, an efficient and flexible model for depth estimation with flow matching to address this challenge. Specifically, 1) we reframe the optimization objective of flow matching as a scale-variable velocity field to improve accuracy. 2) To enhance efficiency, we propose non-uniform sampling to achieve better prediction with fewer sampling steps. 3) We design the Latent Temporal Stabilizer (LTS) to enhance temporal consistency by aggregating latent codes of adjacent frames, enabling our method to be lightweight and compatible for video depth estimation. CH$_3$Depth achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot evaluations across multiple image and video datasets, excelling in prediction accuracy, efficiency, and temporal consistency, highlighting its potential as the next foundation model for depth estimation.