Abstract

Although 3D perception for autonomous vehicles has focused on frontal-view information, more than half of fatal accidents occur due to side impacts in practice (e.g., T-bone crash). Motivated by this fact, we investigate the problem of side-view depth estimation, especially for monocular fisheye cameras, which provide wide FoV information. However, since fisheye cameras head road areas, it observes road areas mostly and results in severe distortion on object areas, such as vehicles or pedestrians. To alleviate these issues, we propose a new fisheye depth estimation network, SlaBins, that infers an accurate and dense depth map based on a geometric property of road environments; most objects are standing (i.e., orthogonal) on the road environments. Concretely, we introduce a slanted multi-cylindrical image (MCI) representation, which allows us to describe a distance as a radius to a cylindrical layer orthogonal to the ground regardless of the camera viewing direction. Based on the slanted MCI, we estimate a set of adaptive bins and a per-pixel probability map for depth estimation. Then by combining it with the estimated slanted angle of viewing direction, we directly infer a dense and accurate depth map for fisheye cameras. Experiments demonstrate that SlaBins outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluation on the SynWoodScape and KITTI-360 depth datasets.