5 research outputs found
The Right (Angled) Perspective: Improving the Understanding of Road Scenes Using Boosted Inverse Perspective Mapping
Many tasks performed by autonomous vehicles such as road marking detection,
object tracking, and path planning are simpler in bird's-eye view. Hence,
Inverse Perspective Mapping (IPM) is often applied to remove the perspective
effect from a vehicle's front-facing camera and to remap its images into a 2D
domain, resulting in a top-down view. Unfortunately, however, this leads to
unnatural blurring and stretching of objects at further distance, due to the
resolution of the camera, limiting applicability. In this paper, we present an
adversarial learning approach for generating a significantly improved IPM from
a single camera image in real time. The generated bird's-eye-view images
contain sharper features (e.g. road markings) and a more homogeneous
illumination, while (dynamic) objects are automatically removed from the scene,
thus revealing the underlying road layout in an improved fashion. We
demonstrate our framework using real-world data from the Oxford RobotCar
Dataset and show that scene understanding tasks directly benefit from our
boosted IPM approach.Comment: equal contribution of first two authors, 8 full pages, 6 figures,
accepted at IV 201
Generating All the Roads to Rome: Road Layout Randomization for Improved Road Marking Segmentation
Road markings provide guidance to traffic participants and enforce safe
driving behaviour, understanding their semantic meaning is therefore paramount
in (automated) driving. However, producing the vast quantities of road marking
labels required for training state-of-the-art deep networks is costly,
time-consuming, and simply infeasible for every domain and condition. In
addition, training data retrieved from virtual worlds often lack the richness
and complexity of the real world and consequently cannot be used directly. In
this paper, we provide an alternative approach in which new road marking
training pairs are automatically generated. To this end, we apply principles of
domain randomization to the road layout and synthesize new images from altered
semantic labels. We demonstrate that training on these synthetic pairs improves
mIoU of the segmentation of rare road marking classes during real-world
deployment in complex urban environments by more than 12 percentage points,
while performance for other classes is retained. This framework can easily be
scaled to all domains and conditions to generate large-scale road marking
datasets, while avoiding manual labelling effort.Comment: presented at ITSC 201