Accurately estimating the orientation of pedestrians is an important and challenging task for autonomous driving because this information is essential for tracking and predicting pedestrian behavior. This paper presents a flexible Virtual Multi-View Synthesis module that can be adopted into 3D object detection methods to improve orientation estimation. The module uses a multi-step process to acquire the fine-grained semantic information required for accurate orientation estimation. First, the scene's point cloud is densified using a structure preserving depth completion algorithm and each point is colorized using its corresponding RGB pixel. Next, virtual cameras are placed around each object in the densified point cloud to generate novel viewpoints, which preserve the object's appearance. We show that this module greatly improves the orientation estimation on the challenging pedestrian class on the KITTI benchmark. When used with the open-source 3D detector AVOD-FPN, we outperform all other published methods on the pedestrian Orientation, 3D, and Bird's Eye View benchmarks.
We present a method for 3D object detection and pose estimation from a single image. In contrast to current techniques that only regress the 3D orientation of an object, our method first regresses relatively stable 3D object properties using a deep convolutional neural network and then combines these estimates with geometric constraints provided by a 2D object bounding box to produce a complete 3D bounding box. The first network output estimates the 3D object orientation using a novel hybrid discrete-continuous loss, which significantly outperforms the L2 loss. The second output regresses the 3D object dimensions, which have relatively little variance compared to alternatives and can often be predicted for many object types. These estimates, combined with the geometric constraints on translation imposed by the 2D bounding box, enable us to recover a stable and accurate 3D object pose. We evaluate our method on the challenging KITTI object detection benchmark [2] both on the official metric of 3D orientation estimation and also on the accuracy of the obtained 3D bounding boxes. Although conceptually simple, our method outperforms more complex and computationally expensive approaches that leverage semantic segmentation, instance level segmentation and flat ground priors [4] and sub-category detection [23][24]. Our discrete-continuous loss also produces state of the art results for 3D viewpoint estimation on the Pascal 3D+ dataset[26]. In this work, we study 3D object detection from RGBD data in both indoor and outdoor scenes. While previous methods focus on images or 3D voxels, often obscuring natural 3D patterns and invariances of 3D data, we directly operate on raw point clouds by popping up RGB-D scans. However, a key challenge of this approach is how to efficiently localize objects in point clouds of large-scale scenes (region proposal). Instead of solely relying on 3D proposals, our method leverages both mature 2D object detectors and advanced 3D deep learning for object localization, achieving efficiency as well as high recall for even small objects. Benefited from learning directly in raw point clouds, our method is also able to precisely estimate 3D bounding boxes even under strong occlusion or with very sparse points. Evaluated on KITTI and SUN RGB-D 3D detection benchmarks, our method outperforms the state of the art by remarkable margins while having real-time capability.  This paper presents a novel approach for joint object detection and orientation estimation in a single deep convolutional neural network utilizing proposals calculated from 3D data. For orientation estimation, we extend a R-CNN like architecture by several carefully designed layers. Two new object proposal methods are introduced, to make use of stereo as well as lidar data. Our experiments on the KITTI dataset show that by combining proposals of both domains, high recall can be achieved while keeping the number of proposals low. Furthermore, our method for joint detection and orientation estimation outperforms state of the art approaches for cyclists on the easy test scenario of the KITTI test dataset. We present AVOD, an Aggregate View Object Detection network for autonomous driving scenarios. The proposed neural network architecture uses LIDAR point clouds and RGB images to generate features that are shared by two subnetworks: a region proposal network (RPN) and a second stage detector network. The proposed RPN uses a novel architecture capable of performing multimodal feature fusion on high resolution feature maps to generate reliable 3D object proposals for multiple object classes in road scenes. Using these proposals, the second stage detection network performs accurate oriented 3D bounding box regression and category classification to predict the extents, orientation, and classification of objects in 3D space. Our proposed architecture is shown to produce state of the art results on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark [1] while running in real time with a low memory footprint, making it a suitable candidate for deployment on autonomous vehicles. Code is available at While head pose estimation has been studied for some time, continuous head pose estimation is still an open problem. Most approaches either cannot deal with the periodicity of angular data or require very fine-grained regression labels. We introduce biternion nets, a CNN-based approach that can be trained on very coarse regression labels and still estimate fully continuous ( 360 ^ ) head poses. We show state-of-the-art results on several publicly available datasets. Finally, we demonstrate how easy it is to record and annotate a new dataset with coarse orientation labels in order to obtain continuous head pose estimates using our biternion nets.