Papers › Fast Robust Monocular Depth Estimation for Obstacle Detection with Fully Convolutional Networks

Fast Robust Monocular Depth Estimation for Obstacle Detection with Fully Convolutional Networks

21 Jul 2016arXiv:1607.06349archive 2025-07-28

Michele Mancini, Gabriele Costante, Paolo Valigi, Thomas A. Ciarfuglia

Obstacle Detection is a central problem for any robotic system, and critical for autonomous systems that travel at high speeds in unpredictable environment. This is often achieved through scene depth estimation, by various means. When fast motion is considered, the detection range must be longer enough to allow for safe avoidance and path planning. Current solutions often make assumption on the motion of the vehicle that limit their applicability, or work at very limited ranges due to intrinsic constraints. We propose a novel appearance-based Object Detection system that is able to detect obstacles at very long range and at a very high speed (~300Hz), without making assumptions on the type of motion. We achieve these results using a Deep Neural Network approach trained on real and synthetic images and trading some depth accuracy for fast, robust and consistent operation. We show how photo-realistic synthetic images are able to solve the problem of training set dimension and variety typical of machine learning approaches, and how our system is robust to massive blurring of test images.

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EbadSyed/spadRGBD mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
LeonSun0101/CD-SD mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
fangchangma/sparse-to-dense.pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
katieluo88/280finalproj_nyudepth mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Depth EstimationMonocular Depth EstimationObject Detectionobject-detection

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