Use Depth Anything V2 Small for Free

Depth Anything V2 Small is an AI model released June 2024 by depth-anything, a leading organization in large language model research. Depth Anything V2 — produces accurate monocular depth maps from a single 2D image. Useful for AR, 3D, and background blur effects. With 25M and a Not applicable context window, Depth Anything V2 Small is designed to excel across a range of demanding tasks — from software engineering and mathematical problem-solving to multilingual content generation and long-document analysis.

Depth Anything V2 Small uses a dense transformer architecture with 25M of parameters, all of which are active for every input token. Dense architectures provide predictable, consistent behavior across diverse task types — there are no "cold" experts to warm up, and quality is uniform across prompts. depth-anything's training pipeline combined large-scale pretraining on a large-scale multilingual pretraining dataset with supervised fine-tuning and alignment techniques (RLHF or DPO), producing Depth Anything V2 Small's characteristic balance of capability, helpfulness, and safety.

As of 2026-10-16, Depth Anything V2 Small by depth-anything demonstrates measurable performance on standard AI evaluation benchmarks. On AbsRel (NYUv2) — which measures model performance on specialized evaluation tasks — it achieves 0.076. These scores place Depth Anything V2 Small — at 25M of parameters — in a competitive position within its model class. Note that benchmark scores reflect controlled evaluation conditions; real-world performance varies by task, prompt design, and domain specificity.

The primary strengths of Depth Anything V2 Small are: State-of-the-art monocular depth from a single 2D image; Generalizes to diverse scenes; MIT license — free commercial use; Small variant: fast for edge deployment. These make it particularly well-suited for AR/VR scene depth understanding, Photography depth-of-field effects, Robotics obstacle avoidance. Users working on complex, multi-step problems benefit most from Depth Anything V2 Small's ability to maintain coherence across long inputs and produce structured, verifiable outputs.

Like all current AI systems, Depth Anything V2 Small has limitations: Relative depth only — no absolute scale by default; Small variant trades accuracy for speed. For production deployments, validating outputs against authoritative sources — especially for domain-specific or time-sensitive information — remains best practice. depth-anything continues to improve Depth Anything V2 Small through ongoing research.

Depth Anything V2 Small is available on LITHOVEX AI with a free account. Unlike direct API access — which requires billing setup, API key management, and per-token charges — LITHOVEX AI provides a seamless browser interface with no setup required, making Depth Anything V2 Small accessible to students, researchers, developers, and early-stage teams globally.

As of 2026-10-16, Depth Anything V2 Small by depth-anything demonstrates measurable performance on standard AI evaluation benchmarks. On AbsRel (NYUv2) — which measures model performance on specialized evaluation tasks — it achieves 0.076. These scores place Depth Anything V2 Small — at 25M of parameters — in a competitive position within its model class. Note that benchmark scores reflect controlled evaluation conditions; real-world performance varies by task, prompt design, and domain specificity.

ViT-Small, 25M parameters, monocular depth estimation

The training pipeline for Depth Anything V2 Small involves multiple stages: large-scale pretraining on diverse multilingual text and code corpora to develop broad world knowledge, followed by supervised fine-tuning on instruction-response pairs, and alignment techniques such as RLHF or DPO. Each stage refines the model's helpfulness, accuracy, and safety. depth-anything's research team — based in China — has optimized Depth Anything V2 Small for the specific capability profile described above.

Inference efficiency: Depth Anything V2 Small at 25M is designed to deliver quality outputs at practical serving speeds. Its Not applicable context window enables processing entire documents, multi-file codebases, and extended conversation histories — particularly valuable for contract review, technical documentation analysis, and codebase-level AI assistance.

Getting started with Depth Anything V2 Small on LITHOVEX AI takes under two minutes. Follow these steps:

For best results with Depth Anything V2 Small: provide specific, context-rich prompts; include examples when generating code; specify output format when structure matters; break complex tasks into focused sub-questions.

depth-anything is a leading organization in AI research and large language model development. Their team has built expertise across natural language processing, model architecture design, and alignment research. depth-anything's models are used by researchers, developers, and enterprises worldwide. Their commitment to advancing AI capability while maintaining responsible deployment practices has made them a respected contributor to the global AI ecosystem. The organization continues to publish research and release models that push the boundaries of what AI systems can achieve.

Founded: 2023, headquartered in China.

Visit the official depth-anything website →

Depth Anything V2 Small by depth-anything competes in a field with several strong alternatives. Below is a detailed side-by-side comparison against commonly listed alternatives, using benchmark data and capability profiles in the catalog.

Both Depth Anything V2 Small and the models above are available free on LITHOVEX AI — test them side by side on your real tasks before committing to a subscription with any provider.

Depth Anything V2 Small is released under MIT, which means you can download and run it on your own hardware. Below are the quickest ways to get started.

Monocular depth estimation enables 3D understanding from everyday cameras — from smartphone AR apps globally to autonomous vehicle backup sensors in every market to industrial robotics in German manufacturing. Depth Anything V2's quality and accessibility has driven global adoption.

Depth Anything V2 Small by depth-anything has the following version history and notable updates:

For the complete changelog and latest release notes, visit the official depth-anything model page.