Modeling Depth Ambiguity: A Mixture-Density Representation for Flying-Point-Free Depth Estimation

ArXi:2606.02552v1 Announce Type: cross Despite advances in depth estimation, flying points remain a persistent failure mode: near object boundaries, depth estimators often predict spurious 3D points in the empty space between foreground and background surfaces. We trace this artifact to a standard modeling choice: assigning each pixel a single depth hypothesis. At boundaries, a pixel can straddle a foreground and a background surface, so its true depth is ambiguous between the two. A model that predicts a single depth cannot keep both possibilities, so.