LiDAR-Guided Monocular 3D Object Detection for Long-Range Railway Monitoring
This addresses the need for robust perception in railway automation to detect hazards like obstacles or pedestrians at long ranges, but it is incremental as it builds on existing approaches like Faraway-Frustum.
The paper tackled long-range 3D object detection for autonomous trains, achieving detection of objects up to 250 meters using a monocular image-based method with LiDAR-guided training.
Railway systems, particularly in Germany, require high levels of automation to address legacy infrastructure challenges and increase train traffic safely. A key component of automation is robust long-range perception, essential for early hazard detection, such as obstacles at level crossings or pedestrians on tracks. Unlike automotive systems with braking distances of ~70 meters, trains require perception ranges exceeding 1 km. This paper presents an deep-learning-based approach for long-range 3D object detection tailored for autonomous trains. The method relies solely on monocular images, inspired by the Faraway-Frustum approach, and incorporates LiDAR data during training to improve depth estimation. The proposed pipeline consists of four key modules: (1) a modified YOLOv9 for 2.5D object detection, (2) a depth estimation network, and (3-4) dedicated short- and long-range 3D detection heads. Evaluations on the OSDaR23 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in detecting objects up to 250 meters. Results highlight its potential for railway automation and outline areas for future improvement.