Although the number of camera-based sensors mounted on vehicles has recently increased dramatically, robust and accurate object velocity detection is difficult. Additionally, it is still common to use radar as a fusion system. We have developed a method to accurately detect the velocity of object using a camera, based on a large-scale dataset collected over 20 years by the automotive manufacturer, SUBARU. The proposed method consists of three methods: an High Dynamic Range (HDR) detection method that fuses multiple stereo disparity images, a fusion method that combines the results of monocular and stereo recognitions, and a new velocity calculation method. The evaluation was carried out using measurement devices and a test course that can quantitatively reproduce severe environment by mounting the developed stereo camera on an actual vehicle.
Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学电气工程学院）
We address the problem of optical decalibration in mobile stereo camera setups, especially in context of autonomous vehicles. In real world conditions, an optical system is subject to various sources of anticipated and unanticipated mechanical stress (vibration, rough handling, collisions). Mechanical stress changes the geometry between the cameras that make up the stereo pair, and as a consequence, the pre-calculated epipolar geometry is no longer valid. Our method is based on optimization of camera geometry parameters and plugs directly into the output of the stereo matching algorithm. There…
StereoCarla: A High-Fidelity Driving Dataset for Generalizable Stereo
School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；IAIR, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学IAIR）；Waytous；CASIA（中国科学院自动化所）；University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；AIR, Tsinghua University（清华大学AIR）
Recently, there are emerging many stereo matching methods for autonomous driving based on unsupervised learning. Most of them take advantage of reconstruction losses to remove dependency on disparity groundtruth. Occlusion handling is a challenging problem in stereo matching, especially for unsupervised methods. Previous unsupervised methods failed to take full advantage of geometry properties in occlusion handling. In this paper, we introduce an effective way to detect occlusion regions and propose a novel unsupervised training strategy to deal with occlusion that only uses the predicted left…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；ATG Robotics（ATG机器人公司）；University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
As an important component of autonomous systems, autonomous car perception has had a big leap with recent advances in parallel computing architectures. With the use of tiny but full-feature embedded supercomputers, computer stereo vision has been prevalently applied in autonomous cars for depth perception. The two key aspects of computer stereo vision are speed and accuracy. They are both desirable but conflicting properties, as the algorithms with better disparity accuracy usually have higher computational complexity. Therefore, the main aim of developing a computer stereo vision algorithm fo…
In this work we showcase the design and assessment of the performance of a multi-camera UAV, when coupled with state-of-the-art planning and mapping algorithms for autonomous navigation. The system leverages state-of-the-art receding horizon exploration techniques for Next-Best-View (NBV) planning with 3D and semantic information, provided by a reconfigurable multi stereo camera system. We employ our approaches in an autonomous drone-based inspection task and evaluate them in an autonomous exploration and mapping scenario. We discuss the advantages and limitations of using multi stereo camera …
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
Recently, three-dimensional (3D) detection based on stereo images has progressed remarkably; however, most advanced methods adopt anchor-based two-dimensional (2D) detection or depth estimation to address this problem. Nevertheless, high computational cost inhibits these methods from achieving real-time performance. In this study, we propose a 3D object detection method, Stereo CenterNet (SC), using geometric information in stereo imagery. SC predicts the four semantic key points of the 3D bounding box of the object in space and utilizes 2D left and right boxes, 3D dimension, orientation, and …
Depth estimation is essential for various important real-world applications such as autonomous driving. However, it suffers from severe performance degradation in high-velocity scenario since traditional cameras can only capture blurred images. To deal with this problem, the spike camera is designed to capture the pixel-wise luminance intensity at high frame rate. However, depth estimation with spike camera remains very challenging using traditional monocular or stereo depth estimation algorithms, which are based on the photometric consistency. In this paper, we propose a novel Uncertainty-Gui…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
We propose a stereo vision-based approach for tracking the camera ego-motion and 3D semantic objects in dynamic autonomous driving scenarios. Instead of directly regressing the 3D bounding box using end-to-end approaches, we propose to use the easy-to-labeled 2D detection and discrete viewpoint classification together with a light-weight semantic inference method to obtain rough 3D object measurements. Based on the object-aware-aided camera pose tracking which is robust in dynamic environments, in combination with our novel dynamic object bundle adjustment (BA) approach to fuse temporal sparse…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Pseudo-LiDAR 3D detectors have made remarkable progress in monocular 3D detection by enhancing the capability of perceiving depth with depth estimation networks, and using LiDAR-based 3D detection architectures. The advanced stereo 3D detectors can also accurately localize 3D objects. The gap in image-to-image generation for stereo views is much smaller than that in image-to-LiDAR generation. Motivated by this, we propose a Pseudo-Stereo 3D detection framework with three novel virtual view generation methods, including image-level generation, feature-level generation, and feature-clone, for de…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
We propose a 3D object detection system with multi-sensor refinement in the context of autonomous driving. In our framework, the monocular camera serves as the fundamental sensor for 2D object proposal and initial 3D bounding box prediction. While the stereo cameras and LiDAR are treated as adaptive plug-in sensors to refine the 3D box localization performance. For each observed element in the raw measurement domain (e.g., pixels for stereo, 3D points for LiDAR), we model the local geometry as an instance vector representation, which indicates the 3D coordinate of each element respecting to th…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；DJI（大疆创新）
We propose a 3D object detection method for autonomous driving by fully exploiting the sparse and dense, semantic and geometry information in stereo imagery. Our method, called Stereo R-CNN, extends Faster R-CNN for stereo inputs to simultaneously detect and associate object in left and right images. We add extra branches after stereo Region Proposal Network (RPN) to predict sparse keypoints, viewpoints, and object dimensions, which are combined with 2D left-right boxes to calculate a coarse 3D object bounding box. We then recover the accurate 3D bounding box by a region-based photometric alig…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Although the recent image-based 3D object detection methods using Pseudo-LiDAR representation have shown great capabilities, a notable gap in efficiency and accuracy still exist compared with LiDAR-based methods. Besides, over-reliance on the stand-alone depth estimator, requiring a large number of pixel-wise annotations in the training stage and more computation in the inferencing stage, limits the scaling application in the real world. In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate 3D object detection method from stereo images, named RTS3D. Different from the 3D occupancy space in the P…
Compact and low-cost devices are needed for autonomous driving to image and measure distances to objects 360-degree around. We have been developing an omnidirectional stereo camera exploiting two hyperbolic mirrors and a single set of a lens and sensor, which makes this camera compact and cost efficient. We establish a new calibration method for this camera considering higher-order radial distortion, detailed tangential distortion, an image sensor tilt, and a lens-mirror offset. Our method reduces the calibration error by 6.0 and 4.3 times for the upper- and lower-view images, respectively. Th…
Institute for Experiential Robotics, Northeastern University（东北大学体验机器人研究所）；Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University（东北大学胡里计算机学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学电气与计算机工程系）
Obstacle detection is a safety-critical problem in robot navigation, where stereo matching is a popular vision-based approach. While deep neural networks have shown impressive results in computer vision, most of the previous obstacle detection works only leverage traditional stereo matching techniques to meet the computational constraints for real-time feedback. This paper proposes a computationally efficient method that employs a deep neural network to detect occupancy from stereo images directly. Instead of learning the point cloud correspondence from the stereo data, our approach extracts t…
Dense 3D maps from wide-angle cameras is beneficial to robotics applications such as navigation and autonomous driving. In this work, we propose a real-time dense 3D mapping method for fisheye cameras without explicit rectification and undistortion. We extend the conventional variational stereo method by constraining the correspondence search along the epipolar curve using a trajectory field induced by camera motion. We also propose a fast way of generating the trajectory field without increasing the processing time compared to conventional rectified methods. With our implementation, we were a…
EgoEV-HandPose: Egocentric 3D Hand Pose Estimation and Gesture Recognition with Stereo Event Cameras
National Research Center for Optical Instrumentation, Zhejiang University（浙江大学光学仪器国家研究中心）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University（湖南大学人工智能与机器人学院和机器人视觉感知与控制技术国家工程研究中心）；Ant Group Company Ltd.（蚂蚁集团有限公司）
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Current self-driving car systems operate well in sunny weather but struggle in adverse conditions. One of the most commonly encountered adverse conditions involves water on the road caused by rain, sleet, melting snow or flooding. While some advances have been made in using conventional RGB camera and LIDAR technology for detecting water hazards, other sources of information such as polarization offer a promising and potentially superior approach to this problem in terms of performance and cost. In this paper, we present a novel stereo-polarization system for detecting and tracking water hazar…
This paper describes a multimodal vision sensor that integrates three types of cameras, including a stereo camera, a polarization camera and a panoramic camera. Each sensor provides a specific dimension of information: the stereo camera measures depth per pixel, the polarization obtains the degree of polarization, and the panoramic camera captures a 360-degree landscape. Data fusion and advanced environment perception could be built upon the combination of sensors. Designed especially for autonomous driving, this vision sensor is shipped with a robust semantic segmentation network. In addition…
This paper proposes a novel approach for extending monocular visual odometry to a stereo camera system. The proposed method uses an additional camera to accurately estimate and optimize the scale of the monocular visual odometry, rather than triangulating 3D points from stereo matching. Specifically, the 3D points generated by the monocular visual odometry are projected onto the other camera of the stereo pair, and the scale is recovered and optimized by directly minimizing the photometric error. It is computationally efficient, adding minimal overhead to the stereo vision system compared to s…
Snap Inc.（Snap公司）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Wormpex AI Research（Wormpex人工智能研究院）
This work proposes an end-to-end approach to estimate full 3D hand pose from stereo cameras. Most existing methods of estimating hand pose from stereo cameras apply stereo matching to obtain depth map and use depth-based solution to estimate hand pose. In contrast, we propose to bypass the stereo matching and directly estimate the 3D hand pose from the stereo image pairs. The proposed neural network architecture extends from any keypoint predictor to estimate the sparse disparity of the hand joints. In order to effectively train the model, we propose a large scale synthetic dataset that is com…
We propose Stereo Direct Sparse Odometry (Stereo DSO) as a novel method for highly accurate real-time visual odometry estimation of large-scale environments from stereo cameras. It jointly optimizes for all the model parameters within the active window, including the intrinsic/extrinsic camera parameters of all keyframes and the depth values of all selected pixels. In particular, we propose a novel approach to integrate constraints from static stereo into the bundle adjustment pipeline of temporal multi-view stereo. Real-time optimization is realized by sampling pixels uniformly from image reg…
In this paper, we present a novel linear algorithm to estimate the 6 DoF relative pose from consecutive frames of stereo rolling shutter (RS) cameras. Our method is derived based on the assumption that stereo cameras undergo motion with constant velocity around the center of the baseline, which needs 9 pairs of correspondences on both left and right consecutive frames. The stereo RS images enable the recovery of depth maps from the semi-global matching (SGM) algorithm. With the estimated camera motion and depth map, we can correct the RS images to get the undistorted images without any scene s…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织）
Stereo camera systems play an important role in robotics applications to perceive the 3D world. However, conventional cameras have drawbacks such as low dynamic range, motion blur and latency due to the underlying frame-based mechanism. Event cameras address these limitations as they report the brightness changes of each pixel independently with a fine temporal resolution, but they are unable to acquire absolute intensity information directly. Although integrated hybrid event-frame sensors (eg., DAVIS) are available, the quality of data is compromised by coupling at the pixel level in the circ…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences（卡尔斯鲁厄应用技术大学）
We present a new dataset to evaluate monocular, stereo, and plenoptic camera based visual odometry algorithms. The dataset comprises a set of synchronized image sequences recorded by a micro lens array (MLA) based plenoptic camera and a stereo camera system. For this, the stereo cameras and the plenoptic camera were assembled on a common hand-held platform. All sequences are recorded in a very large loop, where beginning and end show the same scene. Therefore, the tracking accuracy of a visual odometry algorithm can be measured from the drift between beginning and end of the sequence. For both…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；FZI Research Center for Information Technology（FZI信息技术研究中心）
In this paper, we present TEScalib, a novel extrinsic self-calibration approach of LiDAR and stereo camera using the geometric and photometric information of surrounding environments without any calibration targets for automated driving vehicles. Since LiDAR and stereo camera are widely used for sensor data fusion on automated driving vehicles, their extrinsic calibration is highly important. However, most of the LiDAR and stereo camera calibration approaches are mainly target-based and therefore time consuming. Even the newly developed targetless approaches in last years are either inaccurate…
We introduce DROID-SLAM, a new deep learning based SLAM system. DROID-SLAM consists of recurrent iterative updates of camera pose and pixelwise depth through a Dense Bundle Adjustment layer. DROID-SLAM is accurate, achieving large improvements over prior work, and robust, suffering from substantially fewer catastrophic failures. Despite training on monocular video, it can leverage stereo or RGB-D video to achieve improved performance at test time. The URL to our open source code is https://github.com/princeton-vl/DROID-SLAM.
Depth maps obtained from commercially available structured-light stereo based depth cameras, such as the Kinect, are easy to use but are affected by significant amounts of noise. This paper is devoted to a study of the intrinsic noise characteristics of such depth maps, i.e. the standard deviation of noise in estimated depth varies quadratically with the distance of the object from the depth camera. We validate this theoretical model against empirical observations and demonstrate the utility of this noise model in three popular applications: depth map denoising, volumetric scan merging for 3D …
We propose DiffuStereo, a novel system using only sparse cameras (8 in this work) for high-quality 3D human reconstruction. At its core is a novel diffusion-based stereo module, which introduces diffusion models, a type of powerful generative models, into the iterative stereo matching network. To this end, we design a new diffusion kernel and additional stereo constraints to facilitate stereo matching and depth estimation in the network. We further present a multi-level stereo network architecture to handle high-resolution (up to 4k) inputs without requiring unaffordable memory footprint. Give…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center（未来媒体网络协同创新中心）；University of California at Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
High-speed, high-resolution stereoscopic (H2-Stereo) video allows us to perceive dynamic 3D content at fine granularity. The acquisition of H2-Stereo video, however, remains challenging with commodity cameras. Existing spatial super-resolution or temporal frame interpolation methods provide compromised solutions that lack temporal or spatial details, respectively. To alleviate this problem, we propose a dual camera system, in which one camera captures high-spatial-resolution low-frame-rate (HSR-LFR) videos with rich spatial details, and the other captures low-spatial-resolution high-frame-rate…
We propose a novel 3D human pose detector using two panoramic cameras. We show that transforming fisheye perspectives to rectilinear views allows a direct application of two-dimensional deep-learning pose estimation methods, without the explicit need for a costly re-training step to compensate for fisheye image distortions. By utilizing panoramic cameras, our method is capable of accurately estimating human poses over a large field of view. This renders our method suitable for ergonomic analyses and other pose based assessments.
In this paper we present a novel method for obstacle avoidance using the stereo camera. The conventional obstacle avoidance methods and their limitations are discussed. A new algorithm is developed for the real-time obstacle avoidance which responds faster to unexpected obstacles. In this approach the depth map is divided into optimized number of regions and the minimum depth at each section is assigned as the depth of that region. A fuzzy controller is designed to create the drive commands for the robot/quadcopter. The system was tested on multiple paths with different obstacles and the resul…
In this work, we present a camera configuration for acquiring "stereoscopic dark flash" images: a simultaneous stereo pair in which one camera is a conventional RGB sensor, but the other camera is sensitive to near-infrared and near-ultraviolet instead of R and B. When paired with a "dark" flash (i.e., one having near-infrared and near-ultraviolet light, but no visible light) this camera allows us to capture the two images in a flash/no-flash image pair at the same time, all while not disturbing any human subjects or onlookers with a dazzling visible flash. We present a hardware prototype of t…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Orbbec（奥比中光）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
It is well known that the passive stereo system cannot adapt well to weak texture objects, e.g., white walls. However, these weak texture targets are very common in indoor environments. In this paper, we present a novel stereo system, which consists of two cameras (an RGB camera and an IR camera) and an IR speckle projector. The RGB camera is used both for depth estimation and texture acquisition. The IR camera and the speckle projector can form a monocular structured-light (MSL) subsystem, while the two cameras can form a binocular stereo subsystem. The depth map generated by the MSL subsyste…
Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Einstein Center Digital Future（爱因斯坦数字未来中心）；SCIoI Excellence Cluster（SCIoI卓越集群）
This work introduces a co-capture system for multi-animal visual data acquisition using conventional cameras and event cameras. Event cameras offer multiple advantages over frame-based cameras, such as a high temporal resolution and temporal redundancy suppression, which enable us to efficiently capture the fast and erratic movements of fish. We furthermore present an event-based multi-animal tracking algorithm, which proves the feasibility of the approach and sets the baseline for further exploration of combining the advantages of event cameras and conventional cameras for multi-animal tracki…
University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）
We present a 3D printed adapter with planar mirrors for stereo reconstruction using front and back smartphone camera. The adapter presents a practical and low-cost solution for enabling any smartphone to be used as a stereo camera, which is currently only possible using high-end phones with expensive 3D sensors. Using the prototype version of the adapter, we experiment with parameters like the angles between cameras and mirrors and the distance to each camera (the stereo baseline). We find the most convenient configuration and calibrate the stereo pair. Based on the presented preliminary analy…
Computational stereo has reached a high level of accuracy, but degrades in the presence of occlusions, repeated textures, and correspondence errors along edges. We present a novel approach based on neural networks for depth estimation that combines stereo from dual cameras with stereo from a dual-pixel sensor, which is increasingly common on consumer cameras. Our network uses a novel architecture to fuse these two sources of information and can overcome the above-mentioned limitations of pure binocular stereo matching. Our method provides a dense depth map with sharp edges, which is crucial fo…
SDGE: Stereo Guided Depth Estimation for 360$^\circ$ Camera Sets
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；SZ DJI Technology Co., Ltd.（深圳市大疆创新科技有限公司）；The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）
This paper proposes a novel method of estimating the absolute scale of monocular SfM for a multi-modal stereo camera. In the fields of computer vision and robotics, scale estimation for monocular SfM has been widely investigated in order to simplify systems. This paper addresses the scale estimation problem for a stereo camera system in which two cameras capture different spectral images (e.g., RGB and FIR), whose feature points are difficult to directly match using descriptors. Furthermore, the number of matching points between FIR images can be comparatively small, owing to the low resolutio…
We present a method for decomposing the 3D scene flow observed from a moving stereo rig into stationary scene elements and dynamic object motion. Our unsupervised learning framework jointly reasons about the camera motion, optical flow, and 3D motion of moving objects. Three cooperating networks predict stereo matching, camera motion, and residual flow, which represents the flow component due to object motion and not from camera motion. Based on rigid projective geometry, the estimated stereo depth is used to guide the camera motion estimation, and the depth and camera motion are used to guide…
High-accuracy per-pixel depth is vital for computational photography, so smartphones now have multimodal camera systems with time-of-flight (ToF) depth sensors and multiple color cameras. However, producing accurate high-resolution depth is still challenging due to the low resolution and limited active illumination power of ToF sensors. Fusing RGB stereo and ToF information is a promising direction to overcome these issues, but a key problem remains: to provide high-quality 2D RGB images, the main color sensor's lens is optically stabilized, resulting in an unknown pose for the floating lens t…
Stereo-Inertial Poser: Towards Metric-Accurate Shape-Aware Motion Capture Using Sparse IMUs and a Single Stereo Camera
School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学学院）；Meta Robotics Institute, SJTU（SJTU机器人研究院）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）；Idneo Inc.（Idneo公司）
This article explores a face recognition alternative which seeks to contribute to resolve current security vulnerabilities in most recognition architectures. Current low cost facial authentication software in the market can be fooled by a printed picture of a face due to the lack of depth information. The presented software creates a depth map of the face with the help of a stereo setup, offering a higher level of security than traditional recognition programs. Analysis of the person's identity and facial depth map are processed through deep convolutional neural networks, providing a secure lo…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；AquaMed Research and Education（AquaMed研究与教育）
In this paper we address the problem of multiple camera calibration in the presence of a homogeneous scene, and without the possibility of employing calibration object based methods. The proposed solution exploits salient features present in a larger field of view, but instead of employing active vision we replace the cameras with stereo rigs featuring a long focal analysis camera, as well as a short focal registration camera. Thus, we are able to propose an accurate solution which does not require intrinsic variation models as in the case of zooming cameras. Moreover, the availability of the …
