Abstract: Autonomous driving is a key factor for future mobility. Properly perceiving the environment of the vehicles is essential for a safe driving, which requires computing accurate geometric and semantic information in real-time. In this paper, we challenge state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms for building a perception system for autonomous driving. An inherent drawback in the computation of visual semantics is the trade-off between accuracy and computational cost. We propose to circumvent this problem by following an offline-online strategy. During the offline stage dense 3D semantic maps are created. In the online stage the current driving area is recognized in the maps via a re-localization process, which allows to retrieve the pre-computed accurate semantics and 3D geometry in realtime. Then, detecting the dynamic obstacles we obtain a rich understanding of the current scene. We evaluate quantitatively our proposal in the KITTI dataset and discuss the related open challenges for the computer vision community.

Abstract: Despite recent significant advances, pedestrian detection continues to be an extremely challenging problem in real scenarios. In order to develop a detector that successfully operates under these conditions, it becomes critical to leverage upon multiple cues, multiple imaging modalities and a strong multi-view classifier that accounts for different pedestrian views and poses. In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation that gives insight into how each of these aspects (multi-cue, multimodality and strong multi-view classifier) affect performance both individually and when integrated together. In the multimodality component we explore the fusion of RGB and depth maps obtained by high-definition LIDAR, a type of modality that is only recently starting to receive attention. As our analysis reveals, although all the aforementioned aspects significantly help in improving the performance, the fusion of visible spectrum and depth information allows to boost the accuracy by a much larger margin. The resulting detector not only ranks among the top best performers in the challenging KITTI benchmark, but it is built upon very simple blocks that are easy to implement and computationally efficient. These simple blocks can be easily replaced with more sophisticated ones recently proposed, such as the use of convolutional neural networks for feature representation, to further improve the accuracy.

Abstract: The most relevant modules of a pedestrian detector are the candidate generation and the candidate classification. The former aims at presenting image windows to the latter so that they are classified as containing a pedestrian or not. Much attention has being paid to the classification module, while candidate generation has mainly relied on (multiscale) sliding window pyramid. However, candidate generation is critical for achieving real-time. In this paper we assume a context of autonomous driving based on stereo vision. Accordingly, we evaluate the effect of taking into account the 3D information (derived from the stereo) in order to prune the hundred of thousands windows per image generated by classical pyramidal sliding window. For our study we use a multimodal (RGB, disparity) and multi-descriptor (HOG, LBP, HOG+LBP) holistic ensemble based on linear SVM. Evaluation on data from the challenging KITTI benchmark suite shows the effectiveness of using 3D information to dramatically reduce the number of candidate windows, even improving the overall pedestrian detection accuracy.

Abstract: This paper presents a preliminary study on the registration and fusion of cross-spectral imaging. The objective is to evaluate the validity of widely used computer vision approaches when they are applied at different
spectral bands. In particular, we are interested in merging images from the infrared (both long wave infrared: LWIR and near infrared: NIR) and visible spectrum (VS). Experimental results with different data sets are presented.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel methodology to compute a 3D scene
representation. The algorithm uses macro scale polygonal primitives to model the scene. This means that the representation of the scene is given as a list of large scale polygons that describe the geometric structure of the environment. Results show that the approach is capable of producing accurate descriptions of the scene. In addition, the algorithm is very efficient when compared to other techniques.