No Arabic abstract
Monocular 3D object detection is of great significance for autonomous driving but remains challenging. The core challenge is to predict the distance of objects in the absence of explicit depth information. Unlike regressing the distance as a single variable in most existing methods, we propose a novel geometry-based distance decomposition to recover the distance by its factors. The decomposition factors the distance of objects into the most representative and stable variables, i.e. the physical height and the projected visual height in the image plane. Moreover, the decomposition maintains the self-consistency between the two heights, leading to robust distance prediction when both predicted heights are inaccurate. The decomposition also enables us to trace the causes of the distance uncertainty for different scenarios. Such decomposition makes the distance prediction interpretable, accurate, and robust. Our method directly predicts 3D bounding boxes from RGB images with a compact architecture, making the training and inference simple and efficient. The experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the monocular 3D Object Detection and Birds Eye View tasks of the KITTI dataset, and can generalize to images with different camera intrinsics.
Geometry Projection is a powerful depth estimation method in monocular 3D object detection. It estimates depth dependent on heights, which introduces mathematical priors into the deep model. But projection process also introduces the error amplification problem, in which the error of the estimated height will be amplified and reflected greatly at the output depth. This property leads to uncontrollable depth inferences and also damages the training efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Geometry Uncertainty Projection Network (GUP Net) to tackle the error amplification problem at both inference and training stages. Specifically, a GUP module is proposed to obtains the geometry-guided uncertainty of the inferred depth, which not only provides high reliable confidence for each depth but also benefits depth learning. Furthermore, at the training stage, we propose a Hierarchical Task Learning strategy to reduce the instability caused by error amplification. This learning algorithm monitors the learning situation of each task by a proposed indicator and adaptively assigns the proper loss weights for different tasks according to their pre-tasks situation. Based on that, each task starts learning only when its pre-tasks are learned well, which can significantly improve the stability and efficiency of the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The overall model can infer more reliable object depth than existing methods and outperforms the state-of-the-art image-based monocular 3D detectors by 3.74% and 4.7% AP40 of the car and pedestrian categories on the KITTI benchmark.
As a crucial task of autonomous driving, 3D object detection has made great progress in recent years. However, monocular 3D object detection remains a challenging problem due to the unsatisfactory performance in depth estimation. Most existing monocular methods typically directly regress the scene depth while ignoring important relationships between the depth and various geometric elements (e.g. bounding box sizes, 3D object dimensions, and object poses). In this paper, we propose to learn geometry-guided depth estimation with projective modeling to advance monocular 3D object detection. Specifically, a principled geometry formula with projective modeling of 2D and 3D depth predictions in the monocular 3D object detection network is devised. We further implement and embed the proposed formula to enable geometry-aware deep representation learning, allowing effective 2D and 3D interactions for boosting the depth estimation. Moreover, we provide a strong baseline through addressing substantial misalignment between 2D annotation and projected boxes to ensure robust learning with the proposed geometric formula. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our method remarkably improves the detection performance of the state-of-the-art monocular-based method without extra data by 2.80% on the moderate test setting. The model and code will be released at https://github.com/YinminZhang/MonoGeo.
As cameras are increasingly deployed in new application domains such as autonomous driving, performing 3D object detection on monocular images becomes an important task for visual scene understanding. Recent advances on monocular 3D object detection mainly rely on the ``pseudo-LiDAR generation, which performs monocular depth estimation and lifts the 2D pixels to pseudo 3D points. However, depth estimation from monocular images, due to its poor accuracy, leads to inevitable position shift of pseudo-LiDAR points within the object. Therefore, the predicted bounding boxes may suffer from inaccurate location and deformed shape. In this paper, we present a novel neighbor-voting method that incorporates neighbor predictions to ameliorate object detection from severely deformed pseudo-LiDAR point clouds. Specifically, each feature point around the object forms their own predictions, and then the ``consensus is achieved through voting. In this way, we can effectively combine the neighbors predictions with local prediction and achieve more accurate 3D detection. To further enlarge the difference between the foreground region of interest (ROI) pseudo-LiDAR points and the background points, we also encode the ROI prediction scores of 2D foreground pixels into the corresponding pseudo-LiDAR points. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark to validate the merits of our proposed method. Our results on the birds eye view detection outperform the state-of-the-art performance by a large margin, especially for the ``hard level detection.
Recognizing and localizing objects in the 3D space is a crucial ability for an AI agent to perceive its surrounding environment. While significant progress has been achieved with expensive LiDAR point clouds, it poses a great challenge for 3D object detection given only a monocular image. While there exist different alternatives for tackling this problem, it is found that they are either equipped with heavy networks to fuse RGB and depth information or empirically ineffective to process millions of pseudo-LiDAR points. With in-depth examination, we realize that these limitations are rooted in inaccurate object localization. In this paper, we propose a novel and lightweight approach, dubbed {em Progressive Coordinate Transforms} (PCT) to facilitate learning coordinate representations. Specifically, a localization boosting mechanism with confidence-aware loss is introduced to progressively refine the localization prediction. In addition, semantic image representation is also exploited to compensate for the usage of patch proposals. Despite being lightweight and simple, our strategy leads to superior improvements on the KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset monocular 3D detection benchmarks. At the same time, our proposed PCT shows great generalization to most coordinate-based 3D detection frameworks. The code is available at: https://github.com/amazon-research/progressive-coordinate-transforms .
Detecting and localizing objects in the real 3D space, which plays a crucial role in scene understanding, is particularly challenging given only a monocular image due to the geometric information loss during imagery projection. We propose MonoGRNet for the amodal 3D object detection from a monocular image via geometric reasoning in both the observed 2D projection and the unobserved depth dimension. MonoGRNet decomposes the monocular 3D object detection task into four sub-tasks including 2D object detection, instance-level depth estimation, projected 3D center estimation and local corner regression. The task decomposition significantly facilitates the monocular 3D object detection, allowing the target 3D bounding boxes to be efficiently predicted in a single forward pass, without using object proposals, post-processing or the computationally expensive pixel-level depth estimation utilized by previous methods. In addition, MonoGRNet flexibly adapts to both fully and weakly supervised learning, which improves the feasibility of our framework in diverse settings. Experiments are conducted on KITTI, Cityscapes and MS COCO datasets. Results demonstrate the promising performance of our framework in various scenarios.