Fusing Bird View LIDAR Point Cloud and Front View Camera Image for Deep Object Detection

We propose a new method for fusing a LIDAR point cloud and camera-captured images in the deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed method constructs a new layer called non-homogeneous pooling layer to transform features between bird view map and front view map. The sparse LIDAR point cloud is used to construct the mapping between the two maps. The pooling layer allows efficient fusion of the bird view and front view features at any stage of the network. This is favorable for the 3D-object detection using camera-LIDAR fusion in autonomous driving scenarios. A corresponding deep CNN is designed and tested on the KITTI bird view object detection dataset, which produces 3D bounding boxes from the bird view map. The fusion method shows particular benefit for detection of pedestrians in the bird view compared to other fusion-based object detection networks.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 3 table

Joint Attention in Driver-Pedestrian Interaction: from Theory to Practice

Today, one of the major challenges that autonomous vehicles are facing is the ability to drive in urban environments. Such a task requires communication between autonomous vehicles and other road users in order to resolve various traffic ambiguities. The interaction between road users is a form of negotiation in which the parties involved have to share their attention regarding a common objective or a goal (e.g. crossing an intersection), and coordinate their actions in order to accomplish it. In this literature review we aim to address the interaction problem between pedestrians and drivers (or vehicles) from joint attention point of view. More specifically, we will discuss the theoretical background behind joint attention, its application to traffic interaction and practical approaches to implementing joint attention for autonomous vehicles