In the absence of parallax cues, a learning based single image depth estimation (SIDE) model relies heavily on shading and contextual cues in the image. While this simplicity is attractive, it is necessary to train such models on large and varied datasets, which are difficult to capture. It has been shown that using embeddings from pretrained foundational models, such as CLIP, improves zero shot transfer in several applications. Taking inspiration from this, in our paper we explore the use of global image priors generated from a pretrained ViT model to provide more detailed contextual information. We argue that the embedding vector from a ViT model, pretrained on a large dataset, captures greater relevant information for SIDE than the usual route of generating pseudo image captions, followed by CLIP based text embeddings. Based on this idea, we propose a new SIDE model using a diffusion backbone which is conditioned on ViT embeddings. Our proposed design establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for SIDE on NYU Depth v2 dataset, achieving Abs Rel error of 0.059(14% improvement) compared to 0.069 by the current SOTA (VPD). And on KITTI dataset, achieving Sq Rel error of 0.139 (2% improvement) compared to 0.142 by the current SOTA (GED). For zero shot transfer with a model trained on NYU Depth v2, we report mean relative improvement of (20%, 23%,81%, 25%) over NeWCRF on (Sun-RGBD, iBimsl, DIODE, HyperSim) datasets, compared to (16%, 18%, 45%, 9%) by ZoEDepth. The code is available in our project page.

We focus on the problem of LiDAR point cloud based loop detection (or Finding) and closure (LDC) for mobile robots. State-of-the-art (SOTA) methods directly generate learned embeddings from a given point cloud, require large data augmentation, and are not robust to wide viewpoint variations in 6 Degrees-of-Freedom (DOF). Moreover, the absence of strong priors in an unstructured point cloud leads to highly inaccurate LDC. In this original approach, we propose independent roll and pitch canonicalization of point clouds using a common dominant ground plane. We discretize the canonicalized point clouds along the axis perpendicular to the ground plane leads to images similar to digital elevation maps (DEMs), which expose strong spatial priors in the scene. Our experiments show that LDC based on learnt embeddings from such DEMs is not only data efficient but also significantly more robust, and generalizable than the current SOTA. We report an (average precision for loop detection, mean absolute translation/rotation error) improvement of (8.4, 16.7/5.43)% on the KITTI08 sequence, and (11.0, 34.0/25.4)% on GPR10 sequence, over the current SOTA. To further test the robustness of our technique on point clouds in 6-DOF motion we create and opensource a custom dataset called Lidar-UrbanFly Dataset (LUF) which consists of point clouds obtained from a LiDAR mounted on a quadrotor. More details on our website https://gsc2001.github.io/FinderNet/