High-throughput and accurate cross-scale 3D sensing with a meta-depth sensor

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ID: 326276
2026
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Abstract
Abstract Depth sensing has been widely applied in industrial inspection, transportation, and consumer electronics. However, existing methods still face an inherent trade-off between depth precision and data throughput. Here, we present a meta-imaging-empowered depth sensor (MDS), a fully passive and monocular modality, that transcends this limitation through aberration robust disparity-depth calibration and vision foundation model empowered fine-gained 3D ranging based on a scanning light-field imaging system. Our system synergizes high-throughput disparity estimation and massive data prior of foundation model, enabling high-precision fine-grained metric depth estimation across depth ranges from 0.1 meter to 500 meters. Experimental validation demonstrates 2.5-mm absolute depth precision at 1.5-m distance (0.18% relative error) and 3-megapixel resolution, outperforming conventional light-field depth sensors by 7 times in accuracy and 5 times in spatial resolution without sacrificing imaging speed with a virtual scanning technique. We also achieve turbulence-robust remote depth sensing at the 500-m distance with a significantly denser spatial sampling rate compared with commercial LiDAR systems, and a depth estimation precision of 0.7 m at 235 m distance. By unifying the throughput advantages of passive imaging with high-precision depth estimation ability of physics-aware neural regression, the proposed MDS establishes a scalable paradigm for high-fidelity passive 3D sensing across scales, with applications ranging from industrial inspection to autonomous driving.
Reference Key
openalex_W7203963815 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Tao Yu, Ning Li, Qingqian Lang, Zhexuan Cao, Yuhan Hao, Laiyu Zhu, Jiamin Wu, Qionghai Dai
Journal national science review
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/nsr/nwag524
URL
https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwag524
Keywords Keywords not found

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