Prompting Depth Anything for 4K Resolution Accurate Metric Depth Estimation
To resolve the accuracy–cost trade-off between low-cost LiDAR and high-resolution metric depth estimation, this paper introduces Prompt Depth Anything—a novel paradigm that leverages sparse, low-accuracy LiDAR point clouds as multi-scale geometric prompts to guide the Depth Anything foundation model toward 4K-resolution metric depth prediction. Methodologically, we design a lightweight prompt fusion architecture enabling cross-scale feature alignment and develop a scalable data pipeline integrating LiDAR physics simulation with pseudo-ground-truth generation from real-world scenes. Evaluated on ARKitScenes and ScanNet++, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing 4K depth error by 21.3% relatively. Moreover, the high-fidelity depth maps substantially enhance downstream applications, including photorealistic 3D reconstruction and general-purpose robotic grasping.