3D visual illusion is a perceptual phenomenon where a two-dimensional plane is manipulated to simulate three-dimensional spatial relationships, making a flat artwork or object look three-dimensional in the human visual system. In this paper, we reveal that the machine visual system is also seriously fooled by 3D visual illusions, including monocular and binocular depth estimation. In order to explore and analyze the impact of 3D visual illusion on depth estimation, we collect a large dataset containing almost 3k scenes and 200k images to train and evaluate SOTA monocular and binocular depth estimation methods. We also propose a robust depth estimation framework that uses common sense from a vision-language model to adaptively select reliable depth from binocular disparity and monocular depth. Experiments show that SOTA monocular, binocular, and multi-view depth estimation approaches are all fooled by various 3D visual illusions, while our method achieves SOTA performance.
View on arXiv@article{yao2025_2505.13061,
title={ 3D Visual Illusion Depth Estimation },
author={ Chengtang Yao and Zhidan Liu and Jiaxi Zeng and Lidong Yu and Yuwei Wu and Yunde Jia },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13061},
year={ 2025 }
}