Stabilizing Streaming Video Geometry via Dynamic Feature Normalization
About
Consistent 3D geometry estimation from streaming RGB input is crucial for real-world applications such as autonomous driving, embodied AI, and large-scale reconstruction. While modern monocular geometry foundation models achieve strong single-image accuracy, they exhibit severe temporal inconsistency on continuous input, notably dominated by scale--shift drifting. Through targeted empirical analysis, we trace this instability to its root cause: fluctuations in latent feature statistics, whose mean and variance directly determine the predicted depth's scale and shift. Building on this insight, we introduce Dynamic Feature Normalization (DyFN), a lightweight, causal recurrent module that dynamically and robustly modulates feature statistics to maintain stable geometry over time. We adapt powerful pretrained monocular geometry models for streaming by finetuning only DyFN, a mere 2\% additional parameters, while keeping the backbone frozen, thereby achieving temporal consistency without compromising single-image accuracy. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks show that DyFN effectively eliminates temporal artifacts such as disjointed layering and positional jitter, and achieves state-of-the-art temporal stability, improving over prior streaming methods by up to 14\% and even outperforming heavier non-causal video baselines. Project Page: https://shawlyu.github.io/DyFN
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Depth Estimation | Sintel ~50 frames | AbsRel0.18 | 70 | |
| Depth Estimation | KITTI 110 frames | AbsRel6.2 | 69 | |
| Video Depth Estimation | Bonn 110 frames | AbsRel4.4 | 63 | |
| Video Depth Estimation | Scannet 90 frames | AbsRel0.073 | 22 |