eSharp: Diffusion-based Sharp Monocular Metric Event-to-Depth Estimation

arXiv:2611.08731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Depth perception is fundamental for autonomous navigation, industrial inspection, and mixed-reality systems. It often operates under strict constraints on power and form factor. In such cases, monocular depth estimation (MDE) is often used. Even as recent advances continue to improve monocular depth quality, conventional frame-based MDE systems remain challenged by fast motion and high-dynamic-range scenes. This work introduces eSharp, an MDE framework that addresses these problems using an event camera. eSharp repurposes pretrained diffusion priors for event-only MDE and produces accurate metric depth with unparalleled sharpness on real data. Real-world event datasets provide only sparse LiDAR depth maps for ground-truth supervision, making dense prediction challenging. We address this limitation through cross-modal distillation, using LiDAR-calibrated dense pseudo-labels generated from a spatially co-registered frame camera to train eSharp. Experiments show that eSharp outperforms prior event-to-depth baselines in both metric-depth accuracy and spatial fidelity, establishing diffusion models as a promising foundation for event-driven 3D perception.