In this research, we propose a new 3D object detector with a trustworthy depth estimation, dubbed BEVDepth, for camera-based Bird's-Eye-View~(BEV) 3D object detection. Our work is based on a key observation -- depth estimation in recent approaches is surprisingly inadequate given the fact that depth is essential to camera 3D detection. Our BEVDepth resolves this by leveraging explicit depth supervision. A camera-awareness depth estimation module is also introduced to facilitate the depth predicting capability. Besides, we design a novel Depth Refinement Module to counter the side effects carried by imprecise feature unprojection. Aided by customized Efficient Voxel Pooling and multi-frame mechanism, BEVDepth achieves the new state-of-the-art 60.9% NDS on the challenging nuScenes test set while maintaining high efficiency. For the first time, the NDS score of a camera model reaches 60%. Codes have been released.

BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

Bounded by the inherent ambiguity of depth perception, contemporary camera-based 3D object detection methods fall into the performance bottleneck. Intuitively, leveraging temporal multi-view stereo (MVS) technology is the natural knowledge for tackling this ambiguity. However, traditional attempts of MVS are flawed in two aspects when applying to 3D object detection scenes: 1) The affinity measurement among all views suffers expensive computation cost; 2) It is difficult to deal with outdoor scenarios where objects are often mobile. To this end, we introduce an effective temporal stereo method to dynamically select the scale of matching candidates, enable to significantly reduce computation overhead. Going one step further, we design an iterative algorithm to update more valuable candidates, making it adaptive to moving candidates. We instantiate our proposed method to multi-view 3D detector, namely BEVStereo. BEVStereo achieves the new state-of-the-art performance (i.e., 52.5% mAP and 61.0% NDS) on the camera-only track of nuScenes dataset. Meanwhile, extensive experiments reflect our method can deal with complex outdoor scenarios better than contemporary MVS approaches. Codes have been released at https://github.com/Megvii-BaseDetection/BEVStereo.

BEVStereo: Enhancing Depth Estimation in Multi-view 3D Object Detection with Dynamic Temporal Stereo

Stereo matching is a fundamental building block for many vision and robotics applications. An informative and concise cost volume representation is vital for stereo matching of high accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel cost volume construction method which generates attention weights from correlation clues to suppress redundant information and enhance matching-related information in the concatenation volume. To generate reliable attention weights, we propose multi-level adaptive patch matching to improve the distinctiveness of the matching cost at different disparities even for textureless regions. The proposed cost volume is named attention concatenation volume (ACV) which can be seamlessly embedded into most stereo matching networks, the resulting networks can use a more lightweight aggregation network and meanwhile achieve higher accuracy, e.g. using only 1/25 parameters of the aggregation network can achieve higher accuracy for GwcNet. Furthermore, we design a highly accurate network (ACVNet) based on our ACV, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/gangweiX/ACVNet.

Attention Concatenation Volume for Accurate and Efficient Stereo Matching

Depth estimation is solved as a regression or classification problem in existing learning-based multi-view stereo methods. Although these two representations have recently demonstrated their excellent performance, they still have apparent shortcomings, e.g., regression methods tend to overfit due to the indirect learning cost volume, and classification methods cannot directly infer the exact depth due to its discrete prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel representation, termed Unification, to unify the advantages of regression and classification. It can directly constrain the cost volume like classification methods, but also realize the sub-pixel depth prediction like regression methods. To excavate the potential of unification, we design a new loss function named Unified Focal Loss, which is more uniform and reasonable to combat the challenge of sample imbalance. Combining these two unburdened modules, we present a coarse-to-fine framework, that we call UniMVSNet. The results of ranking first on both DTU and Tanks and Temples benchmarks verify that our model not only performs the best but also has the best generalization ability.

Rethinking Depth Estimation for Multi-View Stereo: A Unified Representation

Learning accurate depth is essential to multi-view 3D object detection. Recent approaches mainly learn depth from monocular images, which confront inherent difficulties due to the ill-posed nature of monocular depth learning. Instead of using a sole monocular depth method, in this work, we propose a novel Surround-view Temporal Stereo (STS) technique that leverages the geometry correspondence between frames across time to facilitate accurate depth learning. Specifically, we regard the field of views from all cameras around the ego vehicle as a unified view, namely surroundview, and conduct temporal stereo matching on it. The resulting geometrical correspondence between different frames from STS is utilized and combined with the monocular depth to yield final depth prediction. Comprehensive experiments on nuScenes show that STS greatly boosts 3D detection ability, notably for medium and long distance objects. On BEVDepth with ResNet-50 backbone, STS improves mAP and NDS by 2.6% and 1.4%, respectively. Consistent improvements are observed when using a larger backbone and a larger image resolution, demonstrating its effectiveness

STS: Surround-view Temporal Stereo for Multi-view 3D Detection

We present PatchmatchNet, a novel and learnable cascade formulation of Patchmatch for high-resolution multi-view stereo. With high computation speed and low memory requirement, PatchmatchNet can process higher resolution imagery and is more suited to run on resource limited devices than competitors that employ 3D cost volume regularization. For the first time we introduce an iterative multi-scale Patchmatch in an end-to-end trainable architecture and improve the Patchmatch core algorithm with a novel and learned adaptive propagation and evaluation scheme for each iteration. Extensive experiments show a very competitive performance and generalization for our method on DTU, Tanks & Temples and ETH3D, but at a significantly higher efficiency than all existing top-performing models: at least two and a half times faster than state-of-the-art methods with twice less memory usage.

PatchmatchNet: Learned Multi-View Patchmatch Stereo

We present PatchmatchNet, a novel and learnable cascade formulation of Patchmatch for high-resolution multi-view stereo. With high computation speed and low memory requirement, PatchmatchNet can process higher resolution imagery and is more suited to run on resource limited devices than competitors that employ 3D cost volume regularization. For the first time we introduce an iterative multi-scale Patchmatch in an end-to-end trainable architecture and improve the Patchmatch core algorithm with a novel and learned adaptive propagation and evaluation scheme for each iteration. Extensive experiments show a very competitive performance and generalization for our method on DTU, Tanks & Temples and ETH3D, but at a significantly higher efficiency than all existing top-performing models: at least two and a half times faster than state-of-the-art methods with twice less memory usage. Code is available at https://github.com/FangjinhuaWang/PatchmatchNet.

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Fangjinhua Wang

Papers

PatchmatchNet: Learned Multi-View Patchmatch Stereo

PatchmatchNet: Learned Multi-View Patchmatch Stereo