Abstract: Robust and dense computation of depth information from stereo-camera systems is a computationally demanding requirement for real-time autonomous driving. Semi-Global Matching (SGM) [1] approximates heavy-computation global algorithms results but with lower computational complexity, therefore it is a good candidate for a real-time implementation. SGM minimizes energy along several 1D paths across the image. The aim of this work is to provide a real-time system producing reliable results on energy-efficient hardware. Our design runs on a NVIDIA Titan X GPU at 104.62 FPS and on a NVIDIA Drive PX at 6.7 FPS, promising for real-time platforms

Abstract: State-of-the-art approaches for semantic image segmentation are built on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The typical segmentation architecture is composed of (a) a downsampling path responsible for extracting coarse semantic features, followed by (b) an upsampling path trained to recover the input image resolution at the output of the model and, optionally, (c) a post-processing module (e.g. Conditional Random Fields) to refine the model predictions.
Recently, a new CNN architecture, Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNets), has shown excellent results on image classification tasks. The idea of DenseNets is based on the observation that if each layer is directly connected to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion then the network will be more accurate and easier to train.
In this paper, we extend DenseNets to deal with the problem of semantic segmentation. We achieve state-of-the-art results on urban scene benchmark datasets such as CamVid and Gatech, without any further post-processing module nor pretraining. Moreover, due to smart construction of the model, our approach has much less parameters than currently published best entries for these datasets.