Boosting Metric Depth Completion via Training-Free Adaptive Response Geometry

arXiv:2609.36168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Depth completion aims to recover dense metric depth from sparse sensor measurements, increasingly leveraging visual foundation models as geometric priors. However, aligning these priors to true metric scale typically relies on rigid affine assumptions in predefined coordinate systems, leaving systematic calibration errors. Linearity in depth calibration depends on the response coordinate. We introduce adaptive response geometry, which makes the fixed choice of depth, log depth, or disparity an image-level unknown. A continuous response family unifies these coordinates and defines an explicit depth-dependent gain. We derive the response-gradient relation and estimate the response parameters in metric space. Hard-Dirichlet residual reconstruction completes the calibrated prior. Under deliberately incomplete metric observations, the training-free pipeline achieves macro AbsRel 0.0301 and macro NMed 14.04{\deg}, improving both aggregate measures over PriorDA, LDCM, and Any2Full. Linearity diagnostics examine how the selected response changes the depth relation and its metric error.