Nighttime stereo depth estimation is still challenging, as assumptions associated with daytime lighting conditions do not hold any longer. Nighttime is not only about low-light and dense noise, but also about glow/glare, flares, non-uniform distribut
ion of light, etc. One of the possible solutions is to train a network on night stereo images in a fully supervised manner. However, to obtain proper disparity ground-truths that are dense, independent from glare/glow, and have sufficiently far depth ranges is extremely intractable. To address the problem, we introduce a network joining day/night translation and stereo. In training the network, our method does not require ground-truth disparities of the night images, or paired day/night images. We utilize a translation network that can render realistic night stereo images from day stereo images. We then train a stereo network on the rendered night stereo images using the available disparity supervision from the corresponding day stereo images, and simultaneously also train the day/night translation network. We handle the fake depth problem, which occurs due to the unsupervised/unpaired translation, for light effects (e.g., glow/glare) and uninformative regions (e.g., low-light and saturated regions), by adding structure-preservation and weighted-smoothness constraints. Our experiments show that our method outperforms the baseline methods on night images.
Project AutoVision aims to develop localization and 3D scene perception capabilities for a self-driving vehicle. Such capabilities will enable autonomous navigation in urban and rural environments, in day and night, and with cameras as the only exter
oceptive sensors. The sensor suite employs many cameras for both 360-degree coverage and accurate multi-view stereo; the use of low-cost cameras keeps the cost of this sensor suite to a minimum. In addition, the project seeks to extend the operating envelope to include GNSS-less conditions which are typical for environments with tall buildings, foliage, and tunnels. Emphasis is placed on leveraging multi-view geometry and deep learning to enable the vehicle to localize and perceive in 3D space. This paper presents an overview of the project, and describes the sensor suite and current progress in the areas of calibration, localization, and perception.
