Many tasks performed by autonomous vehicles such as road marking detection, object tracking, and path planning are simpler in bird's-eye view. Hence, Inverse Perspective Mapping (IPM) is often applied to remove the perspective effect from a vehicle's front-facing camera and to remap its images into a 2D domain, resulting in a top-down view. Unfortunately, however, this leads to unnatural blurring and stretching of objects at further distance, due to the resolution of the camera, limiting applicability. In this paper, we present an adversarial learning approach for generating a significantly improved IPM from a single camera image in real time. The generated bird'seye-view images contain sharper features (e.g, road markings) and a more homogeneous illumination, while (dynamic) objects are automatically removed from the scene, thus revealing the underlying road layout in an improved fashion. We demonstrate our framework using real-world data from the Oxford Robot-Car Dataset and show that scene understanding tasks directly benefit from our boosted IPM approach.
Very recently, @cite_12 proposed the first learning approach for IPM using a synthetic dataset. The authors introduced BridgeGAN which employs the homography IPM to bridge the significant appearance gap between the frontal view and bird's-eye view. In contrast, we use real-world data and consequently labels to generate boosted IPM for larger scenes. Therefore, our learned mapping is directly beneficial for scene understanding tasks (see Section ).
@cite_12
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Environment perception is an important task with great practical value and bird view is an essential part for creating panoramas of surrounding environment. Due to the large gap and severe deformation between the frontal view and bird view, generating a bird view image from a single frontal view is challenging. To tackle this problem, we propose the BridgeGAN, i.e., a novel generative model for bird view synthesis. First, an intermediate view, i.e., homography view, is introduced to bridge the large gap. Next, conditioned on the three views (frontal view, homography view and bird view) in our task, a multi-GAN based model is proposed to learn the challenging cross-view translation. Furthermore, to guarantee one-to-one cross-view correspondences and consistent cross-view feature representations, two consistency constraints are designed for our task. Extensive experiments conducted on a synthetic dataset have demonstrated that the images generated by our model are much better than those generated by existing methods, with more consistent global appearance and sharper details. Ablation studies and discussions show its reliability and robustness in some challenging cases.