Computer Vision

MetricAnything: Scaling Metric Depth Pretraining with Noisy Heterogeneous Sources

BBaorui MaJJiahui YangDDonglin DiXXuancheng ZhangJJianxun CuiHHao LiYYan XieWWei Chen
Published
January 29, 2026
Authors
8
Word Count
18,857

Scalable pretraining paradigm achieves robust metric depth estimation.

Abstract

Scaling has powered recent advances in vision foundation models, yet extending this paradigm to metric depth estimation remains challenging due to heterogeneous sensor noise, camera-dependent biases, and metric ambiguity in noisy cross-source 3D data. We introduce Metric Anything, a simple and scalable pretraining framework that learns metric depth from noisy, diverse 3D sources without manually engineered prompts, camera-specific modeling, or task-specific architectures. Central to our approach is the Sparse Metric Prompt, created by randomly masking depth maps, which serves as a universal interface that decouples spatial reasoning from sensor and camera biases. Using about 20M image-depth pairs spanning reconstructed, captured, and rendered 3D data across 10000 camera models, we demonstrate-for the first time-a clear scaling trend in the metric depth track. The pretrained model excels at prompt-driven tasks such as depth completion, super-resolution and Radar-camera fusion, while its distilled prompt-free student achieves state-of-the-art results on monocular depth estimation, camera intrinsics recovery, single/multi-view metric 3D reconstruction, and VLA planning. We also show that using pretrained ViT of Metric Anything as a visual encoder significantly boosts Multimodal Large Language Model capabilities in spatial intelligence. These results show that metric depth estimation can benefit from the same scaling laws that drive modern foundation models, establishing a new path toward scalable and efficient real-world metric perception. We open-source MetricAnything at http://metric-anything.github.io/metric-anything-io/ to support community research.

Key Takeaways

  • 1

    Simple pretraining unlocks robust metric depth perception.

  • 2

    Large-scale data and decoupling biases yield state-of-the-art results.

  • 3

    Versatile model excels across diverse downstream tasks.

Limitations

  • Requires large, diverse datasets and significant computational resources.

  • Performance may degrade under extreme conditions or unseen sensors.

Keywords

vision foundation modelsmetric depth estimationsparse metric promptpretraining frameworkdepth completionsuper-resolutionRadar-camera fusionmonocular depth estimationcamera intrinsics recovery3D reconstructionVLA planningvisual encoderMultimodal Large Language Modelspatial intelligence

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