November 2020
tl;dr: CenterNet-based approach, with better distance estimation
Overall impression
Authors from TUD, Germany. The paper proposed two approaches for distance estimation. One is based on DORN with better discretization strategy, and the second is based on breaking down the distance into two large bins, one for near objects and the other for faraway ones.
Overall this paper is a very solid contribution to monocular 3D object detection. Nothing fancy, but concrete experiment and small design tweaks.
A quick summary of CenterNet monocular 3D object detection.
- CenterNet predicts 2D bbox center and uses it as 3D bbox center.
- SMOKE predicts projected 3D bbox center.
- KM3D-Net and Center3D predict 2D bbox center and offset from projected 3D bbox center.
- MonoDLE predicts projected 3D bbox center, and also predicts offset to 2D bbox as auxiliary task.
Key ideas
- 2D and projected 3D center are different
- the gap decreases for faraway objects and which appear in the center area of the image plane.
- The gap becomes significant for objects that are close to the camera or on the image boundary.
- LID (linear increasing discretization)
- The SID (space-increasing discretization) approach used by DORN gives too dense bins in the unnecessary nearby range.
- The length of the bins increases linearly in LID (and log-wise in SID).
- DORN counts the number of bins with proba > 0.5 as ordinal label and use the median value of that bins the estimated depth in meters.
- LID also uses a regression bit to predict the residual value. –> This is very important to ensure good depth estimation as shown in the ablation study.
- See also mu-law.
- DepJoint: piece wise depth prediction
- Breaking the distance into two bins (either overlapping or back-to-back bins)
- Eigen’s exponential transformation of distance: $\Phi (d) = e ^ {-d}$.
- This has very good accuracy in close range, but not so in distance range
- Augment the prediction for faraway objects by also predicting $d’ = d_{max} - d$. Then during inference, uses the weighted prediction of the two prediction.
- The bin breakdown is controlled by two hyper parameters. The bins can have overlap or back-to-back.
Technical details
- RA (reference area) solves the issue of lack of supervision for attribute prediction. Not only the GT center point contribute to the attribute prediction losses, but a dilated support region is used to predict all the attribute. –> this is inspired by the support region in SS3D.
Notes
- Questions and notes on how to improve/revise the current work