MSDC-Net: Multi-Scale Dense and Contextual Networks for Automated Disparity Map for Stereo Matching

Disparity prediction from stereo images is essential to computer vision applications including autonomous driving, 3D model reconstruction, and object detection. To predict accurate disparity map, we propose a novel deep learning architecture for detectingthe disparity map from a rectified pair of stereo images, called MSDC-Net. Our MSDC-Net contains two modules: multi-scale fusion 2D convolution and multi-scale residual 3D convolution modules. The multi-scale fusion 2D convolution module exploits the potential multi-scale features, which extracts and fuses the different scale features by Dense-Net. The multi-scale residual 3D convolution module learns the different scale geometry context from the cost volume which aggregated by the multi-scale fusion 2D convolution module. Experimental results on Scene Flow and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our MSDC-Net significantly outperforms other approaches in the non-occluded region.Comment: Accepted at ICIGP201

Learning Dense Stereo Matching for Digital Surface Models from Satellite Imagery

Digital Surface Model generation from satellite imagery is a difficult task that has been largely overlooked by the deep learning community. Stereo reconstruction techniques developed for terrestrial systems including self driving cars do not translate well to satellite imagery where image pairs vary considerably. In this work we present neural network tailored for Digital Surface Model generation, a ground truthing and training scheme which maximizes available hardware, and we present a comparison to existing methods. The resulting models are smooth, preserve boundaries, and enable further processing. This represents one of the first attempts at leveraging deep learning in this domain

Deep Rigid Instance Scene Flow

In this paper we tackle the problem of scene flow estimation in the context of self-driving. We leverage deep learning techniques as well as strong priors as in our application domain the motion of the scene can be composed by the motion of the robot and the 3D motion of the actors in the scene. We formulate the problem as energy minimization in a deep structured model, which can be solved efficiently in the GPU by unrolling a Gaussian-Newton solver. Our experiments in the challenging KITTI scene flow dataset show that we outperform the state-of-the-art by a very large margin, while being 800 times faster.Comment: CVPR 2019. Rank 1st on KITTI scene flow benchmark. 800 times faster than prior ar

KeyPose: Multi-View 3D Labeling and Keypoint Estimation for Transparent Objects

Estimating the 3D pose of desktop objects is crucial for applications such as robotic manipulation. Many existing approaches to this problem require a depth map of the object for both training and prediction, which restricts them to opaque, lambertian objects that produce good returns in an RGBD sensor. In this paper we forgo using a depth sensor in favor of raw stereo input. We address two problems: first, we establish an easy method for capturing and labeling 3D keypoints on desktop objects with an RGB camera; and second, we develop a deep neural network, called $KeyPose$, that learns to accurately predict object poses using 3D keypoints, from stereo input, and works even for transparent objects. To evaluate the performance of our method, we create a dataset of 15 clear objects in five classes, with 48K 3D-keypoint labeled images. We train both instance and category models, and show generalization to new textures, poses, and objects. KeyPose surpasses state-of-the-art performance in 3D pose estimation on this dataset by factors of 1.5 to 3.5, even in cases where the competing method is provided with ground-truth depth. Stereo input is essential for this performance as it improves results compared to using monocular input by a factor of 2. We will release a public version of the data capture and labeling pipeline, the transparent object database, and the KeyPose models and evaluation code. Project website: https://sites.google.com/corp/view/keypose.Comment: CVPR 202

Learning Depth with Convolutional Spatial Propagation Network

Depth prediction is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective convolutional spatial propagation network (CSPN) to learn the affinity matrix for various depth estimation tasks. Specifically, it is an efficient linear propagation model, in which the propagation is performed with a manner of recurrent convolutional operation, and the affinity among neighboring pixels is learned through a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). We can append this module to any output from a state-of-the-art (SOTA) depth estimation networks to improve their performances. In practice, we further extend CSPN in two aspects: 1) take sparse depth map as additional input, which is useful for the task of depth completion; 2) similar to commonly used 3D convolution operation in CNNs, we propose 3D CSPN to handle features with one additional dimension, which is effective in the task of stereo matching using 3D cost volume. For the tasks of sparse to dense, a.k.a depth completion. We experimented the proposed CPSN conjunct algorithms over the popular NYU v2 and KITTI datasets, where we show that our proposed algorithms not only produce high quality (e.g., 30% more reduction in depth error), but also run faster (e.g., 2 to 5x faster) than previous SOTA spatial propagation network. We also evaluated our stereo matching algorithm on the Scene Flow and KITTI Stereo datasets, and rank 1st on both the KITTI Stereo 2012 and 2015 benchmarks, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed module. The code of CSPN proposed in this work will be released at https://github.com/XinJCheng/CSPN.Comment: v1.2: add some exps v1.1: fixed some mistakes, v1: 17 pages, 12 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1808.0015

Self-Supervised Learning for Stereo Matching with Self-Improving Ability

Exiting deep-learning based dense stereo matching methods often rely on ground-truth disparity maps as the training signals, which are however not always available in many situations. In this paper, we design a simple convolutional neural network architecture that is able to learn to compute dense disparity maps directly from the stereo inputs. Training is performed in an end-to-end fashion without the need of ground-truth disparity maps. The idea is to use image warping error (instead of disparity-map residuals) as the loss function to drive the learning process, aiming to find a depth-map that minimizes the warping error. While this is a simple concept well-known in stereo matching, to make it work in a deep-learning framework, many non-trivial challenges must be overcome, and in this work we provide effective solutions. Our network is self-adaptive to different unseen imageries as well as to different camera settings. Experiments on KITTI and Middlebury stereo benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms many state-of-the-art stereo matching methods with a margin, and at the same time significantly faster.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure

OmniDepth: Dense Depth Estimation for Indoors Spherical Panoramas

Recent work on depth estimation up to now has only focused on projective images ignoring 360 content which is now increasingly and more easily produced. We show that monocular depth estimation models trained on traditional images produce sub-optimal results on omnidirectional images, showcasing the need for training directly on 360 datasets, which however, are hard to acquire. In this work, we circumvent the challenges associated with acquiring high quality 360 datasets with ground truth depth annotations, by re-using recently released large scale 3D datasets and re-purposing them to 360 via rendering. This dataset, which is considerably larger than similar projective datasets, is publicly offered to the community to enable future research in this direction. We use this dataset to learn in an end-to-end fashion the task of depth estimation from 360 images. We show promising results in our synthesized data as well as in unseen realistic images.Comment: Pre-print to appear in ECCV1

Real-time 3D Traffic Cone Detection for Autonomous Driving

Considerable progress has been made in semantic scene understanding of road scenes with monocular cameras. It is, however, mainly related to certain classes such as cars and pedestrians. This work investigates traffic cones, an object class crucial for traffic control in the context of autonomous vehicles. 3D object detection using images from a monocular camera is intrinsically an ill-posed problem. In this work, we leverage the unique structure of traffic cones and propose a pipelined approach to the problem. Specifically, we first detect cones in images by a tailored 2D object detector; then, the spatial arrangement of keypoints on a traffic cone are detected by our deep structural regression network, where the fact that the cross-ratio is projection invariant is leveraged for network regularization; finally, the 3D position of cones is recovered by the classical Perspective n-Point algorithm. Extensive experiments show that our approach can accurately detect traffic cones and estimate their position in the 3D world in real time. The proposed method is also deployed on a real-time, critical system. It runs efficiently on the low-power Jetson TX2, providing accurate 3D position estimates, allowing a race-car to map and drive autonomously on an unseen track indicated by traffic cones. With the help of robust and accurate perception, our race-car won both Formula Student Competitions held in Italy and Germany in 2018, cruising at a top-speed of 54 kmph. Visualization of the complete pipeline, mapping and navigation can be found on our project page.Comment: IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV'19). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1809.1054

DeepV2D: Video to Depth with Differentiable Structure from Motion

We propose DeepV2D, an end-to-end deep learning architecture for predicting depth from video. DeepV2D combines the representation ability of neural networks with the geometric principles governing image formation. We compose a collection of classical geometric algorithms, which are converted into trainable modules and combined into an end-to-end differentiable architecture. DeepV2D interleaves two stages: motion estimation and depth estimation. During inference, motion and depth estimation are alternated and converge to accurate depth. Code is available https://github.com/princeton-vl/DeepV2D

Deep Fundamental Matrix Estimation without Correspondences

Estimating fundamental matrices is a classic problem in computer vision. Traditional methods rely heavily on the correctness of estimated key-point correspondences, which can be noisy and unreliable. As a result, it is difficult for these methods to handle image pairs with large occlusion or significantly different camera poses. In this paper, we propose novel neural network architectures to estimate fundamental matrices in an end-to-end manner without relying on point correspondences. New modules and layers are introduced in order to preserve mathematical properties of the fundamental matrix as a homogeneous rank-2 matrix with seven degrees of freedom. We analyze performance of the proposed models using various metrics on the KITTI dataset, and show that they achieve competitive performance with traditional methods without the need for extracting correspondences.Comment: ECCV 2018, Geometry Meets Deep Learning Worksho