Depth Sensing Beyond LiDAR Range
This addresses safety issues in autonomous driving by extending depth perception range, but it is incremental as it builds on existing camera-based methods.
The paper tackled the limited range of depth sensing in autonomous driving by proposing a three-camera system with a novel algorithm, achieving dense depth maps with acceptable accuracy for long distances beyond typical LiDAR coverage.
Depth sensing is a critical component of autonomous driving technologies, but today's LiDAR- or stereo camera-based solutions have limited range. We seek to increase the maximum range of self-driving vehicles' depth perception modules for the sake of better safety. To that end, we propose a novel three-camera system that utilizes small field of view cameras. Our system, along with our novel algorithm for computing metric depth, does not require full pre-calibration and can output dense depth maps with practically acceptable accuracy for scenes and objects at long distances not well covered by most commercial LiDARs.