Understanding the surrounding environment of the vehicle is still one of the challenges for autonomous driving. This paper addresses 360-degree road scene semantic segmentation using surround view cameras, which are widely equipped in existing production cars. First, in order to address large distortion problem in the fisheye images, Restricted Deformable Convolution (RDC) is proposed for semantic segmentation, which can effectively model geometric transformations by learning the shapes of convolutional filters conditioned on the input feature map. Second, in order to obtain a large-scale training set of surround view images, a novel method called zoom augmentation is proposed to transform conventional images to fisheye images. Finally, an RDC based semantic segmentation model is built. The model is trained for real-world surround view images through a multi-task learning architecture by combining real-world images with transformed images. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the RDC to handle images with large distortions, and the proposed approach shows a good performance using surround view cameras with the help of the transformed images.
Modern computer vision algorithms typically require expensive data acquisition and accurate manual labeling. In this work, we instead leverage the recent progress in computer graphics to generate fully labeled, dynamic, and photo-realistic proxy virtual worlds. We propose an efficient real-to-virtual world cloning method, and validate our approach by building and publicly releasing a new video dataset, called "Virtual KITTI" 1, automatically labeled with accurate ground truth for object detection, tracking, scene and instance segmentation, depth, and optical flow. We provide quantitative experimental evidence suggesting that (i) modern deep learning algorithms pre-trained on real data behave similarly in real and virtual worlds, and (ii) pre-training on virtual data improves performance. As the gap between real and virtual worlds is small, virtual worlds enable measuring the impact of various weather and imaging conditions on recognition performance, all other things being equal. We show these factors may affect drastically otherwise high-performing deep models for tracking. Deep learning for human action recognition in videos is making significant progress, but is slowed down by its dependency on expensive manual labeling of large video collections. In this work, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for Procedural Human Action Videos. It contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1,000 examples for each action of 35 categories. Our approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences, and we procedurally define 14 synthetic actions. We introduce a deep multi-task representation learning architecture to mix synthetic and real videos, even if the action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF101 and HMDB51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance, significantly outperforming fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos. Recent progress in computer vision has been driven by high-capacity models trained on large datasets. Unfortunately, creating large datasets with pixel-level labels has been extremely costly due to the amount of human effort required. In this paper, we present an approach to rapidly creating pixel-accurate semantic label maps for images extracted from modern computer games. Although the source code and the internal operation of commercial games are inaccessible, we show that associations between image patches can be reconstructed from the communication between the game and the graphics hardware. This enables rapid propagation of semantic labels within and across images synthesized by the game, with no access to the source code or the content. We validate the presented approach by producing dense pixel-level semantic annotations for 25 thousand images synthesized by a photorealistic open-world computer game. Experiments on semantic segmentation datasets show that using the acquired data to supplement real-world images significantly increases accuracy and that the acquired data enables reducing the amount of hand-labeled real-world data: models trained with game data and just ( 1 3 ) of the CamVid training set outperform models trained on the complete CamVid training set. Visual understanding of complex urban street scenes is an enabling factor for a wide range of applications. Object detection has benefited enormously from large-scale datasets, especially in the context of deep learning. For semantic urban scene understanding, however, no current dataset adequately captures the complexity of real-world urban scenes. To address this, we introduce Cityscapes, a benchmark suite and large-scale dataset to train and test approaches for pixel-level and instance-level semantic labeling. Cityscapes is comprised of a large, diverse set of stereo video sequences recorded in streets from 50 different cities. 5000 of these images have high quality pixel-level annotations, 20 000 additional images have coarse annotations to enable methods that leverage large volumes of weakly-labeled data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts in terms of dataset size, annotation richness, scene variability, and complexity. Our accompanying empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the dataset characteristics, as well as a performance evaluation of several state-of-the-art approaches based on our benchmark. Visual object analysis researchers are increasingly experimenting with video, because it is expected that motion cues should help with detection, recognition, and other analysis tasks. This paper presents the Cambridge-driving Labeled Video Database (CamVid) as the first collection of videos with object class semantic labels, complete with metadata. The database provides ground truth labels that associate each pixel with one of 32 semantic classes. The database addresses the need for experimental data to quantitatively evaluate emerging algorithms. While most videos are filmed with fixed-position CCTV-style cameras, our data was captured from the perspective of a driving automobile. The driving scenario increases the number and heterogeneity of the observed object classes. Over 10min of high quality 30Hz footage is being provided, with corresponding semantically labeled images at 1Hz and in part, 15Hz. The CamVid Database offers four contributions that are relevant to object analysis researchers. First, the per-pixel semantic segmentation of over 700 images was specified manually, and was then inspected and confirmed by a second person for accuracy. Second, the high-quality and large resolution color video images in the database represent valuable extended duration digitized footage to those interested in driving scenarios or ego-motion. Third, we filmed calibration sequences for the camera color response and intrinsics, and computed a 3D camera pose for each frame in the sequences. Finally, in support of expanding this or other databases, we present custom-made labeling software for assisting users who wish to paint precise class-labels for other images and videos. We evaluate the relevance of the database by measuring the performance of an algorithm from each of three distinct domains: multi-class object recognition, pedestrian detection, and label propagation. Vision-based semantic segmentation in urban scenarios is a key functionality for autonomous driving. Recent revolutionary results of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) foreshadow the advent of reliable classifiers to perform such visual tasks. However, DCNNs require learning of many parameters from raw images, thus, having a sufficient amount of diverse images with class annotations is needed. These annotations are obtained via cumbersome, human labour which is particularly challenging for semantic segmentation since pixel-level annotations are required. In this paper, we propose to use a virtual world to automatically generate realistic synthetic images with pixel-level annotations. Then, we address the question of how useful such data can be for semantic segmentation – in particular, when using a DCNN paradigm. In order to answer this question we have generated a synthetic collection of diverse urban images, named SYNTHIA, with automatically generated class annotations. We use SYNTHIA in combination with publicly available real-world urban images with manually provided annotations. Then, we conduct experiments with DCNNs that show how the inclusion of SYNTHIA in the training stage significantly improves performance on the semantic segmentation task. Semantic segmentation is an important step of visual scene understanding for autonomous driving. Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based methods have successfully applied in semantic segmentation using narrow-angle or even wide-angle pinhole camera. However, in urban traffic environments, autonomous vehicles need wider field of view to perceive surrounding things and stuff, especially at intersections. This paper describes a CNN-based semantic segmentation solution using fisheye camera which covers a large field of view. To handle the complex scene in the fisheye image, Overlapping Pyramid Pooling (OPP) module is proposed to explore local, global and pyramid local region context information. Based on the OPP module, a network structure called OPP-net is proposed for semantic segmentation. The net is trained and evaluated on a fisheye image dataset for semantic segmentation which is generated from an existing dataset of urban traffic scenes. In addition, zoom augmentation, a novel data augmentation policy specially designed for fisheye image, is proposed to improve the net's generalization performance. Experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of the OPP-net for urban traffic scenes and the effectiveness of the zoom augmentation. The Mapillary Vistas Dataset is a novel, large-scale street-level image dataset containing 25000 high-resolution images annotated into 66 object categories with additional, instance-specific labels for 37 classes. Annotation is performed in a dense and fine-grained style by using polygons for delineating individual objects. Our dataset is 5× larger than the total amount of fine annotations for Cityscapes and contains images from all around the world, captured at various conditions regarding weather, season and daytime. Images come from different imaging devices (mobile phones, tablets, action cameras, professional capturing rigs) and differently experienced photographers. In such a way, our dataset has been designed and compiled to cover diversity, richness of detail and geographic extent. As default benchmark tasks, we define semantic image segmentation and instance-specific image segmentation, aiming to significantly further the development of state-of-the-art methods for visual road-scene understanding.