Zhenzhen Xiang

Zhenzhen Xiang, Jingrui Yu, Jie Li et al.

In this paper, we present a multi-camera visual odometry (VO) system for an autonomous vehicle. Our system mainly consists of a virtual LiDAR and a pose tracker. We use a perspective transformation method to synthesize a surround-view image from undistorted fisheye camera images. With a semantic segmentation model, the free space can be extracted. The scans of the virtual LiDAR are generated by discretizing the contours of the free space. As for the pose tracker, we propose a visual odometry system fusing both the feature matching and the virtual LiDAR scan matching results. Only those feature points located in the free space area are utilized to ensure the 2D-2D matching for pose estimation. Furthermore, bundle adjustment (BA) is performed to minimize the feature points reprojection error and scan matching error. We apply our system to an autonomous vehicle equipped with four fisheye cameras. The testing scenarios include an outdoor parking lot as well as an indoor garage. Experimental results demonstrate that our system achieves a more robust and accurate performance comparing with a fisheye camera based monocular visual odometry system.

Zhenzhen Xiang, Anbo Bao, Jie Li et al.

Real-time scene parsing is a fundamental feature for autonomous driving vehicles with multiple cameras. In this letter we demonstrate that sharing semantics between cameras with different perspectives and overlapped views can boost the parsing performance when compared with traditional methods, which individually process the frames from each camera. Our framework is based on a deep neural network for semantic segmentation but with two kinds of additional modules for sharing and fusing semantics. On the one hand, a semantics sharing module is designed to establish the pixel-wise mapping between the input images. Features as well as semantics are shared by the map to reduce duplicated workload which leads to more efficient computation. On the other hand, feature fusion modules are designed to combine different modal of semantic features, which leverage the information from both inputs for better accuracy. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we have applied our network to a dual-camera vision system for driving scene parsing. Experimental results show that our network outperforms the baseline method on the parsing accuracy with comparable computations.