Modern driver assistance systems rely on a wide range of sensors (RADAR, LIDAR, ultrasound and cameras) for scene understanding and prediction. These sensors are typically used for detecting traffic participants and scene elements required for navigation. In this paper we argue that relying on camera based systems, specifically Around View Monitoring (AVM) system has great potential to achieve these goals in both parking and driving modes with decreased costs. The contributions of this paper are as follows: we present a new end-to-end solution for delimiting the safe drivable area for each frame by means of identifying the closest obstacle in each direction from the driving vehicle, we use this approach to calculate the distance to the nearest obstacles and we incorporate it into a unified end-to-end architecture capable of joint object detection, curb detection and safe drivable area detection. Furthermore, we describe the family of networks for both a high accuracy solution and a low complexity solution. We also introduce further augmentation of the base architecture with 3D object detection.
Abstract: State-of-the-art models for semantic segmentation are based on adaptations of convolutional networks that had originally been designed for image classification. However, dense prediction and image classification are structurally different. In this work, we develop a new convolutional network module that is specifically designed for dense prediction. The presented module uses dilated convolutions to systematically aggregate multi-scale contextual information without losing resolution. The architecture is based on the fact that dilated convolutions support exponential expansion of the receptive field without loss of resolution or coverage. We show that the presented context module increases the accuracy of state-of-the-art semantic segmentation systems. In addition, we examine the adaptation of image classification networks to dense prediction and show that simplifying the adapted network can increase accuracy. Convolutional networks are powerful visual models that yield hierarchies of features. We show that convolutional networks by themselves, trained end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels, exceed the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. Our key insight is to build “fully convolutional” networks that take input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with efficient inference and learning. We define and detail the space of fully convolutional networks, explain their application to spatially dense prediction tasks, and draw connections to prior models. We adapt contemporary classification networks (AlexNet [20], the VGG net [31], and GoogLeNet [32]) into fully convolutional networks and transfer their learned representations by fine-tuning [3] to the segmentation task. We then define a skip architecture that combines semantic information from a deep, coarse layer with appearance information from a shallow, fine layer to produce accurate and detailed segmentations. Our fully convolutional network achieves state-of-the-art segmentation of PASCAL VOC (20 relative improvement to 62.2 mean IU on 2012), NYUDv2, and SIFT Flow, while inference takes less than one fifth of a second for a typical image.