9.2CVAug 1
Breaking the Horizontal Prior: From Long-Tailed Orientation Bias to Roll-Robust Monocular Depth EstimationKaihua Tang, Ziqing Xia, Xiaoxu Zheng et al.
Despite recent advances in Monocular Depth Estimation, state-of-the-art depth foundation models remain vulnerable to robustness issues. Particularly, even slight camera rolls can result in substantial degradation in depth estimations. We attribute this problem to a previously overlooked phenomenon, termed the Horizontal Prior, which is a manifestation of long-tailed distribution bias: most training images are captured in approximately horizontal orientations due to human visual preferences and photographic habits. While intuitive remedies such as re-balanced data augmentation and horizon leveling provide partial improvements, they fail to fully address the issue. In this paper, we introduce Invariant Depth Constraint (ID-Constraint), a training-time supervision strategy that improves roll robustness by fine-tuning and jointly regularizing the depth backbone with a series of geometric and spatial reasoning tasks. These auxiliary objectives encourage the backbone to learn rotation-stable, depth-relevant representations, while the auxiliary prediction heads are discarded after training, leaving the original inference architecture unchanged. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets across four roll settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
10.1SYJun 2
When are supercapacitors practically feasible in electric vehicles?Yue Wu, Ziqing Xia, Shaokun Li et al.
While the hybrid energy storage system (HESS) can theoretically mitigate battery degradation in electric vehicles, its practical implementation remains highly limited. To delineate the specific scenarios and application boundaries where supercapacitors remain feasible, this study proposes a multi-dimensional techno-economic feasibility evaluation framework. First, a cross-vehicle sizing method based on dynamic programming is established to quantify physical mass-volume packaging constraints and identify feasible supercapacitor candidates across different vehicle types. Building upon the optimal sizing parameters derived from the battery aging Pareto front, an expert-guided deep reinforcement learning energy management strategy is integrated to yield near-optimal online performance, ensuring a fair life-cycle economic assessment. Finally, a comprehensive feasibility matrix is constructed to systematically evaluate mass, volume, battery lifespan, additional supercapacitor costs, total cost of ownership, future energy storage prices, and the influence of emerging solid-state batteries. Results reveal that city buses remain the most promising vehicle type for HESS due to minimal additional costs and sufficient packaging space. Current mass-volume penalties and limited economic benefits hinder HESS application in passenger vehicles and heavy-duty trucks, respectively. This situation may only improve if supercapacitor prices drop significantly in the future. Beyond vehicle types, the HESS feasibility is governed by load-frequency characteristics. Furthermore, looking toward the 2030+ solid-state battery era, we highlight that integrating increasingly affordable supercapacitors can provide substantial asset protection leverage.