Dan Deng

Junkai Xu, Liang Peng, Haoran Cheng et al.

Multi-camera perception tasks have gained significant attention in the field of autonomous driving. However, existing frameworks based on Lift-Splat-Shoot (LSS) in the multi-camera setting cannot produce suitable dense 3D features due to the projection nature and uncontrollable densification process. To resolve this problem, we propose to regulate intermediate dense 3D features with the help of volume rendering. Specifically, we employ volume rendering to process the dense 3D features to obtain corresponding 2D features (e.g., depth maps, semantic maps), which are supervised by associated labels in the training. This manner regulates the generation of dense 3D features on the feature level, providing appropriate dense and unified features for multiple perception tasks. Therefore, our approach is termed Vampire, stands for "Volume rendering As Multi-camera Perception Intermediate feature REgulator". Experimental results on the Occ3D and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that Vampire facilitates fine-grained and appropriate extraction of dense 3D features, and is competitive with existing SOTA methods across diverse downstream perception tasks like 3D occupancy prediction, LiDAR segmentation and 3D objection detection, while utilizing moderate GPU resources. We provide a video demonstration in the supplementary materials and Codes are available at github.com/cskkxjk/Vampire.

Liang Peng, Fei Liu, Zhengxu Yu et al.

Monocular 3D object detection is a challenging task in the self-driving and computer vision community. As a common practice, most previous works use manually annotated 3D box labels, where the annotating process is expensive. In this paper, we find that the precisely and carefully annotated labels may be unnecessary in monocular 3D detection, which is an interesting and counterintuitive finding. Using rough labels that are randomly disturbed, the detector can achieve very close accuracy compared to the one using the ground-truth labels. We delve into this underlying mechanism and then empirically find that: concerning the label accuracy, the 3D location part in the label is preferred compared to other parts of labels. Motivated by the conclusions above and considering the precise LiDAR 3D measurement, we propose a simple and effective framework, dubbed LiDAR point cloud guided monocular 3D object detection (LPCG). This framework is capable of either reducing the annotation costs or considerably boosting the detection accuracy without introducing extra annotation costs. Specifically, It generates pseudo labels from unlabeled LiDAR point clouds. Thanks to accurate LiDAR 3D measurements in 3D space, such pseudo labels can replace manually annotated labels in the training of monocular 3D detectors, since their 3D location information is precise. LPCG can be applied into any monocular 3D detector to fully use massive unlabeled data in a self-driving system. As a result, in KITTI benchmark, we take the first place on both monocular 3D and BEV (bird's-eye-view) detection with a significant margin. In Waymo benchmark, our method using 10% labeled data achieves comparable accuracy to the baseline detector using 100% labeled data. The codes are released at https://github.com/SPengLiang/LPCG.

Liang Peng, Dan Deng, Deng Cai

Recently, there are emerging many stereo matching methods for autonomous driving based on unsupervised learning. Most of them take advantage of reconstruction losses to remove dependency on disparity groundtruth. Occlusion handling is a challenging problem in stereo matching, especially for unsupervised methods. Previous unsupervised methods failed to take full advantage of geometry properties in occlusion handling. In this paper, we introduce an effective way to detect occlusion regions and propose a novel unsupervised training strategy to deal with occlusion that only uses the predicted left disparity map, by making use of its geometry features in an iterative way. In the training process, we regard the predicted left disparity map as pseudo groundtruth and infer occluded regions using geometry features. The resulting occlusion mask is then used in either training, post-processing, or both of them as guidance. Experiments show that our method could deal with the occlusion problem effectively and significantly outperforms the other unsupervised methods for stereo matching. Moreover, our occlusion-aware strategies can be extended to the other stereo methods conveniently and improve their performances.

Dan Deng, Haifeng Liu, Xuelong Li et al.

Most state-of-the-art scene text detection algorithms are deep learning based methods that depend on bounding box regression and perform at least two kinds of predictions: text/non-text classification and location regression. Regression plays a key role in the acquisition of bounding boxes in these methods, but it is not indispensable because text/non-text prediction can also be considered as a kind of semantic segmentation that contains full location information in itself. However, text instances in scene images often lie very close to each other, making them very difficult to separate via semantic segmentation. Therefore, instance segmentation is needed to address this problem. In this paper, PixelLink, a novel scene text detection algorithm based on instance segmentation, is proposed. Text instances are first segmented out by linking pixels within the same instance together. Text bounding boxes are then extracted directly from the segmentation result without location regression. Experiments show that, compared with regression-based methods, PixelLink can achieve better or comparable performance on several benchmarks, while requiring many fewer training iterations and less training data.