SNVC

Official project website for the AAAI 2022 paper "Stereo Neural Vernier Caliper".

TLDR: SNVC is a multi-resolution voxel-based stereo 3D object detection (S3DOD) approach. It features object-centric modeling and is capable of learning high-resolution local scene representations for precise object center estimation. It studies the local update problem in the stereo perception scenario, enabling model-agnostic refinement and tracking-by-detection.

Environment

Refer to ENV.md to build this project.

Demo: Detection

processed_demo.mp4

Refer to DEMO_DET.md to see how to perform frame-by-frame S3DOD with an examplar python script. SNVC constructs a voxel-based global representation for 3D object proposals, where the user is free to refine such proposals with an instance-level model. If you want to generate a video like this, check out the visualization tool in this repo.

Demo: Instance tracking-by-detection

Refer to DEMO_TBD.md for an examplar tracking-by-detection script. Given an initial 3D cuboid prediction, SNVC is capable of constructing a high-resolution local 3D region-of-interest and searches for the next position of the object.

Demo: Model-agnostic instance-level refinement

Refer to DEMO_REFINE.md for a script demonstrating how the instance-level modeling capability in this repo can be used with other detectors. The instance-level model of SNVC can refine the predictions of different 3D object detectors in a model-agnostic manner. This means you can use any real-time 3D object detector to produce coarse proposals and refine them only when necessary.

Data preparation

Refer to DATASET.md to download and prepare the KITTI dataset used in this project.

Training

Refer to TRAIN.md to train the models by yourself.

Inference

Refer to INFERENCE.md to use pre-trained weights and re-produce the quantitative results.

TraceBox: a simple 3D bounding box visualization tool

This is a simple self-contained python script for visualizing a set of 3D cuboids. It considers occlusion and uses simple ray tracing to obtain the visibility of cuboid vertices (note the dashed lines). You can easily use this script in 3D object detection and 6DoF pose estimation projects.

The following commands visualize N images in the prediction directory PRED_DIR given KITTI root directory KITTI_DIR and save them at SAVE_DIR. Check examples here.

cd tools
python visualize.py --pred_dir PRED_DIR --data_dir KITTI_DIR --save_dir SAVE_DIR --num_show N

License

This repository can be used for non-commercial purposes only. Contact me (nicholas.li@connect.ust.hk) if you are interested in a commercial license. Third-party datasets like KITTI are subject to their own licenses and the user should obey them strictly.

Citation

Please star this repository and cite the following paper in your publications if it helps your research:

@inproceedings{li2022stereo,
  title={Stereo Neural Vernier Caliper},
  author={Li, Shichao and Liu, Zechun and Shen, Zhiqiang and Cheng, Kwang-Ting},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  volume={36},
  year={2022}
}

Link to the paper

Acknowledgement

Certain modules were adapted from DSGN and LIGA-Stereo. Thank the authors for their contributions.