This paper introduces Scene Completeness-Aware Depth Completion (SCADC) to complete raw lidar scans into dense depth maps with fine and complete scene structures. Recent sparse depth completion for lidars only focuses on the lower scenes and produces irregular estimations on the upper because existing datasets, such as KITTI, do not provide groundtruth for upper areas. These areas are considered less important since they are usually sky or trees of less scene understanding interest. However, we argue that in several driving scenarios such as large trucks or cars with loads, objects could extend to the upper parts of scenes. Thus depth maps with structured upper scene estimation are important for RGBD algorithms. SCADC adopts stereo images that produce disparities with better scene completeness but are generally less precise than lidars, to help sparse lidar depth completion. To our knowledge, we are the first to focus on scene completeness of sparse depth completion. We validate our SCADC on both depth estimate precision and scene-completeness on KITTI. Moreover, we experiment on less-explored outdoor RGBD semantic segmentation with scene completeness-aware D-input to validate our method.
Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University（浙江大学控制科学与工程学院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Outdoor scene completion is a challenging issue in 3D scene understanding, which plays an important role in intelligent robotics and autonomous driving. Due to the sparsity of LiDAR acquisition, it is far more complex for 3D scene completion and semantic segmentation. Since semantic features can provide constraints and semantic priors for completion tasks, the relationship between them is worth exploring. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end semantic segmentation-assisted scene completion network, including a 2D completion branch and a 3D semantic segmentation branch. Specifically, the network …
Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) has been widely used in autonomous vehicles for perception and localization. However, the cost of a high-resolution LiDAR is still prohibitively expensive, while its low-resolution counterpart is much more affordable. Therefore, using low-resolution LiDAR for autonomous driving is an economically viable solution, but the point cloud sparsity makes it extremely challenging. In this paper, we propose a two-stage neural network framework that enables 3D object detection using a low-resolution LiDAR. Taking input from a low-resolution LiDAR point cloud and a mon…
Panoptic segmentation is the recently introduced task that tackles semantic segmentation and instance segmentation jointly. In this paper, we present an extension of SemanticKITTI, which is a large-scale dataset providing dense point-wise semantic labels for all sequences of the KITTI Odometry Benchmark, for training and evaluation of laser-based panoptic segmentation. We provide the data and discuss the processing steps needed to enrich a given semantic annotation with temporally consistent instance information, i.e., instance information that supplements the semantic labels and identifies th…
Convolutional neural networks are designed for dense data, but vision data is often sparse (stereo depth, point clouds, pen stroke, etc.). We present a method to handle sparse depth data with optional dense RGB, and accomplish depth completion and semantic segmentation changing only the last layer. Our proposal efficiently learns sparse features without the need of an additional validity mask. We show how to ensure network robustness to varying input sparsities. Our method even works with densities as low as 0.8% (8 layer lidar), and outperforms all published state-of-the-art on the Kitti dept…
TransBridge: Boost 3D Object Detection by Scene-Level Completion with Transformer Decoder
School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机科学学院）；Robotics and Autonomous Driving Lab (RAL), Baidu Research（百度研究机器人与自动驾驶实验室）；State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau（澳门大学智能城市物联网国家重点实验室，计算机与信息科学系）
Current LiDAR-only 3D detection methods inevitably suffer from the sparsity of point clouds. Many multi-modal methods are proposed to alleviate this issue, while different representations of images and point clouds make it difficult to fuse them, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present a novel multi-modal framework SFD (Sparse Fuse Dense), which utilizes pseudo point clouds generated from depth completion to tackle the issues mentioned above. Different from prior works, we propose a new RoI fusion strategy 3D-GAF (3D Grid-wise Attentive Fusion) to make fuller use of info…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院（KAIST））
Despite its importance, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) on LiDAR semantic segmentation is a task that has not received much attention from the research community. Only recently, a completion-based 3D method has been proposed to tackle the problem and formally set up the adaptive scenarios. However, the proposed pipeline is complex, voxel-based and requires multi-stage inference, which inhibits it for real-time inference. We propose a range image-based, effective and efficient method for solving UDA on LiDAR segmentation. The method exploits class prototypes from the source domain to pseud…
LiDAR depth completion is a task that predicts depth values for every pixel on the corresponding camera frame, although only sparse LiDAR points are available. Most of the existing state-of-the-art solutions are based on deep neural networks, which need a large amount of data and heavy computations for training the models. In this letter, a novel non-learning depth completion method is proposed by exploiting the local surface geometry that is enhanced by an outlier removal algorithm. The proposed surface geometry model is inspired by the observation that most pixels with unknown depth have a n…
LDRFusion: A LiDAR-Dominant multimodal refinement framework for 3D object detection
School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China（计算机科学与技术学院，同济大学，上海）；School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China（电子信息工程学院，同济大学，上海）
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
A fast and accurate panoptic segmentation system for LiDAR point clouds is crucial for autonomous driving vehicles to understand the surrounding objects and scenes. Existing approaches usually rely on proposals or clustering to segment foreground instances. As a result, they struggle to achieve real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time end-to-end panoptic segmentation network for LiDAR point clouds, called CPSeg. In particular, CPSeg comprises a shared encoder, a dual-decoder, and a cluster-free instance segmentation head, which is able to dynamically pillarize foregro…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；MPI-IS（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Lidar is a vital sensor for estimating the depth of a scene. Typical spinning lidars emit pulses arranged in several horizontal lines and the monetary cost of the sensor increases with the number of these lines. In this work, we present the new problem of optimizing the positioning of lidar lines to find the most effective configuration for the depth completion task. We propose a solution to reduce the number of lines while retaining the up-to-the-mark quality of depth completion. Our method consists of two components, (1) line selection based on the marginal contribution of a line computed vi…
Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学大数据与脑科学先进创新中心）；State Key Laboratory of Software Development Environment, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学软件开发环境国家重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学计算机科学与工程学院）
LiDAR-based 3D object detection is an important task for autonomous driving and current approaches suffer from sparse and partial point clouds of distant and occluded objects. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage approach, namely PC-RGNN, dealing with such challenges by two specific solutions. On the one hand, we introduce a point cloud completion module to recover high-quality proposals of dense points and entire views with original structures preserved. On the other hand, a graph neural network module is designed, which comprehensively captures relations among points through a local-g…
Modern high-definition LIDAR is expensive for commercial autonomous driving vehicles and small indoor robots. An affordable solution to this problem is fusion of planar LIDAR with RGB images to provide a similar level of perception capability. Even though state-of-the-art methods provide approaches to predict depth information from limited sensor input, they are usually a simple concatenation of sparse LIDAR features and dense RGB features through an end-to-end fusion architecture. In this paper, we introduce an inductive late-fusion block which better fuses different sensor modalities inspire…
In this paper we consider the problem of estimating a dense depth map from a set of sparse LiDAR points. We use techniques from compressed sensing and the recently developed Alternating Direction Neural Networks (ADNNs) to create a deep recurrent auto-encoder for this task. Our architecture internally performs an algorithm for extracting multi-level convolutional sparse codes from the input which are then used to make a prediction. Our results demonstrate that with only two layers and 1800 parameters we are able to out perform all previously published results, including deep networks with orde…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Depth completion aims to recover dense depth maps from sparse depth measurements. It is of increasing importance for autonomous driving and draws increasing attention from the vision community. Most of existing methods directly train a network to learn a mapping from sparse depth inputs to dense depth maps, which has difficulties in utilizing the 3D geometric constraints and handling the practical sensor noises. In this paper, to regularize the depth completion and improve the robustness against noise, we propose a unified CNN framework that 1) models the geometric constraints between depth an…
Depth completion aims to generate a dense depth map from the sparse depth map and aligned RGB image. However, current depth completion methods use extremely expensive 64-line LiDAR(about $100,000) to obtain sparse depth maps, which will limit their application scenarios. Compared with the 64-line LiDAR, the single-line LiDAR is much less expensive and much more robust. Therefore, we propose a method to tackle the problem of single-line depth completion, in which we aim to generate a dense depth map from the single-line LiDAR info and the aligned RGB image. A single-line depth completion datase…
This work proposes a new method to accurately complete sparse LiDAR maps guided by RGB images. For autonomous vehicles and robotics the use of LiDAR is indispensable in order to achieve precise depth predictions. A multitude of applications depend on the awareness of their surroundings, and use depth cues to reason and react accordingly. On the one hand, monocular depth prediction methods fail to generate absolute and precise depth maps. On the other hand, stereoscopic approaches are still significantly outperformed by LiDAR based approaches. The goal of the depth completion task is to generat…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Depth completion aims to predict a dense depth map from a sparse depth input. The acquisition of dense ground truth annotations for depth completion settings can be difficult and, at the same time, a significant domain gap between real LiDAR measurements and synthetic data has prevented from successful training of models in virtual settings. We propose a domain adaptation approach for sparse-to-dense depth completion that is trained from synthetic data, without annotations in the real domain or additional sensors. Our approach simulates the real sensor noise in an RGB+LiDAR set-up, and consist…
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）
Predicting future 3D LiDAR pointclouds is a challenging task that is useful in many applications in autonomous driving such as trajectory prediction, pose forecasting and decision making. In this work, we propose a new LiDAR prediction framework that is based on generative models namely Variational Recurrent Neural Networks (VRNNs), titled Stochastic LiDAR Prediction and Completion (SLPC). Our algorithm is able to address the limitations of previous video prediction frameworks when dealing with sparse data by spatially inpainting the depth maps in the upcoming frames. Our contributions can thu…
DiffSSC: Semantic LiDAR Scan Completion using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Autonomous Intelligent Systems group, Computer Science Institute VI – Intelligent Systems and Robotics – and the Center for Robotics and the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, University of Bonn, Germany（自主智能系统组，计算机科学研究所VI——智能系统与机器人——和机器人中心以及拉马尔人工智能与机器学习研究所，波恩大学，德国）
SLCF-Net: Sequential LiDAR-Camera Fusion for Semantic Scene Completion using a 3D Recurrent U-Net
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）；Center for Robotics（机器人中心）；Computer Science Institute VI – Intelligent Systems and Robotics（计算机科学研究所VI——智能系统与机器人）
The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳市人工智能与机器人研究院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）
LiDAR point cloud analysis is a core task for 3D computer vision, especially for autonomous driving. However, due to the severe sparsity and noise interference in the single sweep LiDAR point cloud, the accurate semantic segmentation is non-trivial to achieve. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation framework assisted by learned contextual shape priors. In practice, an initial semantic segmentation (SS) of a single sweep point cloud can be achieved by any appealing network and then flows into the semantic scene completion (SSC) module as the input. By m…
TU Delft（代尔夫特理工大学）；Mercedes-Benz AG（梅赛德斯-奔驰集团）；Esslingen University of Applied Sciences（埃斯林根应用科学大学）
Semantic scene completion is the task of jointly estimating 3D geometry and semantics of objects and surfaces within a given extent. This is a particularly challenging task on real-world data that is sparse and occluded. We propose a scene segmentation network based on local Deep Implicit Functions as a novel learning-based method for scene completion. Unlike previous work on scene completion, our method produces a continuous scene representation that is not based on voxelization. We encode raw point clouds into a latent space locally and at multiple spatial resolutions. A global scene complet…
Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Intel Labs China（英特尔中国研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）
Recent advances show that semi-supervised implicit representation learning can be achieved through physical constraints like Eikonal equations. However, this scheme has not yet been successfully used for LiDAR point cloud data, due to its spatially varying sparsity. In this paper, we develop a novel formulation that conditions the semi-supervised implicit function on localized shape embeddings. It exploits the strong representation learning power of sparse convolutional networks to generate shape-aware dense feature volumes, while still allows semi-supervised signed distance function learning …
Depth completion, the technique of estimating a dense depth image from sparse depth measurements, has a variety of applications in robotics and autonomous driving. However, depth completion faces 3 main challenges: the irregularly spaced pattern in the sparse depth input, the difficulty in handling multiple sensor modalities (when color images are available), as well as the lack of dense, pixel-level ground truth depth labels. In this work, we address all these challenges. Specifically, we develop a deep regression model to learn a direct mapping from sparse depth (and color images) to dense d…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学智能产业研究院（AIR））；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Scene completion refers to obtaining dense scene representation from an incomplete perception of complex 3D scenes. This helps robots detect multi-scale obstacles and analyse object occlusions in scenarios such as autonomous driving. Recent advances show that implicit representation learning can be leveraged for continuous scene completion and achieved through physical constraints like Eikonal equations. However, former Eikonal completion methods only demonstrate results on watertight meshes at a scale of tens of meshes. None of them are successfully done for non-watertight LiDAR point clouds …
LiDAR depth-only completion is a challenging task to estimate dense depth maps only from sparse measurement points obtained by LiDAR. Even though the depth-only methods have been widely developed, there is still a significant performance gap with the RGB-guided methods that utilize extra color images. We find that existing depth-only methods can obtain satisfactory results in the areas where the measurement points are almost accurate and evenly distributed (denoted as normal areas), while the performance is limited in the areas where the foreground and background points are overlapped due to o…
CoLC: Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception with LiDAR Completion
Key Laboratory of Big Data & Artificial Intelligence in Transportation, Ministry of Education（交通运输大数据与人工智能重点实验室，教育部）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
EfficientPENet: Real-Time Depth Completion from Sparse LiDAR via Lightweight Multi-Modal Fusion
Canizaro Livingston Gulf States Center for Environmental Informatics, the University of New Orleans, New Orleans, USA（Canizaro Livingston Gulf States环境信息中心，新奥尔良大学，美国新奥尔良）；US Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center, Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA（美国陆军工程兵团，工程师研究与发展中心，密西西比州维克斯堡，美国）
Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo（东京大学生产技术研究所）；Human Informatics Laboratories, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation（日本电信电话株式会社人类信息学实验室）
We propose a non-learning depth completion method for a sparse depth map captured using a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor guided by a pair of stereo images. Generally, conventional stereo-aided depth completion methods have two limiations. (i) They assume the given sparse depth map is accurately aligned to the input image, whereas the alignment is difficult to achieve in practice. (ii) They have limited accuracy in the long range because the depth is estimated by pixel disparity. To solve the abovementioned limitations, we propose selective stereo matching (SSM) that searches the mo…
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
This work considers the problem of depth completion, with or without image data, where an algorithm may measure the depth of a prescribed limited number of pixels. The algorithmic challenge is to choose pixel positions strategically and dynamically to maximally reduce overall depth estimation error. This setting is realized in daytime or nighttime depth completion for autonomous vehicles with a programmable LiDAR. Our method uses an ensemble of predictors to define a sampling probability over pixels. This probability is proportional to the variance of the predictions of ensemble members, thus …
