Proving ground
Synthetic scenes with known depth. Every judgement made about the estimator until now has been by eye — this measures it instead, because a scene built from planes at stated distances carries a ground truth no photograph can.
Drop a plate and the depth map that belongs with it — a studio render, a LiDAR capture, a splat depth pass. White near, black far. The estimator runs on the plate and is scored against the truth.
rendered plate
true depth
estimated
error · red near, blue far
Planes — far to near
Start from
Working arrangements with the subjects written and
the tones already the right way round. Change everything about them \u2014 the point is
having something to argue with rather than a blank page.
Subject
Generation prompt
Measurements
Plane by plane
Findings
On the estimator used here. The function below is a copy of the one
in the workbench and the sequencer. That duplication is the one genuinely risky thing in
this file — a test that silently diverges from the code it tests is worse than no test.
If the estimator changes anywhere, it must change here in the same commit.
Depth convention throughout: 1 is nearest, 0 is furthest, matching the shader, which displaces geometry toward the camera as the value rises.