Frustum PointNets for 3D Object Detection from RGB-D Data

In this work, we study 3D object detection from RGB-D data in both indoor and outdoor scenes. While previous methods focus on images or 3D voxels, often obscuring natural 3D patterns and invariances of 3D data, we directly operate on raw point clouds by popping up RGB-D scans. However, a key challenge of this approach is how to efficiently localize objects in point clouds of large-scale scenes (region proposal). Instead of solely relying on 3D proposals, our method leverages both mature 2D object detectors and advanced 3D deep learning for object localization, achieving efficiency as well as high recall for even small objects. Benefited from learning directly in raw point clouds, our method is also able to precisely estimate 3D bounding boxes even under strong occlusion or with very sparse points. Evaluated on KITTI and SUN RGB-D 3D detection benchmarks, our method outperforms the state of the art by remarkable margins while having real-time capability.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, 14 table

Towards Safe Autonomous Driving: Capture Uncertainty in the Deep Neural Network For Lidar 3D Vehicle Detection

To assure that an autonomous car is driving safely on public roads, its object detection module should not only work correctly, but show its prediction confidence as well. Previous object detectors driven by deep learning do not explicitly model uncertainties in the neural network. We tackle with this problem by presenting practical methods to capture uncertainties in a 3D vehicle detector for Lidar point clouds. The proposed probabilistic detector represents reliable epistemic uncertainty and aleatoric uncertainty in classification and localization tasks. Experimental results show that the epistemic uncertainty is related to the detection accuracy, whereas the aleatoric uncertainty is influenced by vehicle distance and occlusion. The results also show that we can improve the detection performance by 1%-5% by modeling the aleatoric uncertainty.Comment: Accepted to present in the 21st IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2018

Object Detection and Classification in Occupancy Grid Maps using Deep Convolutional Networks

A detailed environment perception is a crucial component of automated vehicles. However, to deal with the amount of perceived information, we also require segmentation strategies. Based on a grid map environment representation, well-suited for sensor fusion, free-space estimation and machine learning, we detect and classify objects using deep convolutional neural networks. As input for our networks we use a multi-layer grid map efficiently encoding 3D range sensor information. The inference output consists of a list of rotated bounding boxes with associated semantic classes. We conduct extensive ablation studies, highlight important design considerations when using grid maps and evaluate our models on the KITTI Bird's Eye View benchmark. Qualitative and quantitative benchmark results show that we achieve robust detection and state of the art accuracy solely using top-view grid maps from range sensor data.Comment: 6 pages, 4 tables, 4 figure