Depth-free view synthesis from diffusion models for monocular 3D detector in autonomous driving
摘要
One of the key problems in 3D object detection is to reduce the accuracy gap between methods based on LiDAR sensors and those based on monocular cameras. A recent monocular-based 3D object detection method using Pseudo-Stereo representation has demonstrated significant capabilities. However, three problems have been discovered in existing practices: (1) relying on a high-performance monocular depth estimator, (2) the generated image suffering from visual holes, deformations, and artifacts, and (3) being difficult to be compatible with geometry-based stereo detectors. In this work, we propose a novel pseudo-stereo 3D detection framework without depth estimation, called PS-SVDM. This framework utilizes a diffusion model to generate a high-quality virtual right view from a left image to mimic the stereo camera signal. With this representation, we can apply various existing stereo image-based detection algorithms. Afterwards, we further explore the application of PS-SVDM in depth-free stereo 3D detection, and the final framework is compatible with most stereo detectors. Experiments conducted on the KITTI-3D Car category show that our method can achieve state-of the-art performance among published monocular 3D detectors. Code will be released.