Birds Eye View Object Detection

KITTI (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute) is one of the most popular datasets for use in mobile robotics and autonomous driving. It consists of hours of traffic scenarios recorded with a variety of sensor modalities, including high-resolution RGB, grayscale stereo cameras, and a 3D laser scanner. Despite its popularity, the dataset itself does not contain ground truth for semantic segmentation. However, various researchers have manually annotated parts of the dataset to fit their necessities. Álvarez et al. generated ground truth for 323 images from the road detection challenge with three classes: road, vertical, and sky. Zhang et al. annotated 252 (140 for training and 112 for testing) acquisitions – RGB and Velodyne scans – from the tracking challenge for ten object categories: building, sky, road, vegetation, sidewalk, car, pedestrian, cyclist, sign/pole, and fence. Ros et al. labeled 170 training images and 46 testing images (from the visual odometry challenge) with 11 classes: building, tree, sky, car, sign, road, pedestrian, fence, pole, sidewalk, and bicyclist. Source: A Review on Deep Learning Techniques Applied to Semantic Segmentation Image Source: http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/eval_object.php?obj_benchmark=3d

An important factor in advancing autonomous driving systems is simulation. Yet, there is rather small progress for transferability between the virtual and real world. We revisit this problem for 3D object detection on LiDAR point clouds and propose a dataset generation pipeline based on the CARLA simulator. Utilizing domain randomization strategies and careful modeling, we are able to train an object detector on the synthetic data and demonstrate strong generalization capabilities to the KITTI dataset. The dataset contains point clouds and bounding box labels for training 3D object detection.