Accurate environment perception is essential for automated driving. When using monocular cameras, the distance estimation of elements in the environment poses a major challenge. Distances can be more easily estimated when the camera perspective is transformed to a bird's eye view (BEV). For flat surfaces, Inverse Perspective Mapping (IPM) can accurately transform images to a BEV. Three-dimensional objects such as vehicles and vulnerable road users are distorted by this transformation making it difficult to estimate their position relative to the sensor. This paper describes a methodology to obtain a corrected 360{\deg} BEV image given images from multiple vehicle-mounted cameras. The corrected BEV image is segmented into semantic classes and includes a prediction of occluded areas. The neural network approach does not rely on manually labeled data, but is trained on a synthetic dataset in such a way that it generalizes well to real-world data. By using semantically segmented images as input, we reduce the reality gap between simulated and real-world data and are able to show that our method can be successfully applied in the real world. Extensive experiments conducted on the synthetic data demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to IPM. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ika-rwth-aachen/Cam2BEV
Cross-view image translation is challenging because it involves images with drastically different views and severe deformation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named Multi-Channel Attention SelectionGAN (SelectionGAN) that makes it possible to generate images of natural scenes in arbitrary viewpoints, based on an image of the scene and a novel semantic map. The proposed SelectionGAN explicitly utilizes the semantic information and consists of two stages. In the first stage, the condition image and the target semantic map are fed into a cycled semantic-guided generation network to produce initial coarse results. In the second stage, we refine the initial results by using a multi-channel attention selection mechanism. Moreover, uncertainty maps automatically learned from attentions are used to guide the pixel loss for better network optimization. Extensive experiments on Dayton, CVUSA and Ego2Top datasets show that our model is able to generate significantly better results than the state-of-the-art methods. The source code, data and trained models are available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/SelectionGAN.
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. 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.
In this paper, we propose a novel method to register football broadcast video frames on the static top view model of the playing surface. The proposed method is fully automatic in contrast to the current state of the art which requires manual initialization of point correspondences between the image and the static model. Automatic registration using existing approaches has been difficult due to the lack of sufficient point correspondences. We investigate an alternate approach exploiting the edge information from the line markings on the field. We formulate the registration problem as a nearest neighbour search over a synthetically generated dictionary of edge map and homography pairs. The synthetic dictionary generation allows us to exhaustively cover a wide variety of camera angles and positions and reduce this problem to a minimal per-frame edge map matching procedure. We show that the per-frame results can be improved in videos using an optimization framework for temporal camera stabilization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by presenting extensive results on a dataset collected from matches of football World Cup 2014.