Cited by 121Autonomous Vehicle Technology and SafetyAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsAdvanced Vision and Imaging

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 54 of the 72 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 4 of the 21 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

OmniDet: Surround View Cameras Based Multi-Task Visual Perception Network for Autonomous Driving

Open access
Ravi Kumar, Varun, Yogamani, Senthil, Rashed, Hazem, Sitsu, Ganesh, Witt, Christian, Leang, Isabelle, Milz, Stefan, Mader, Patrick·2021·IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Abstract

Surround View fisheye cameras are commonly deployed in automated driving for 360°near-field sensing around the vehicle. This work presents a multi-task visual perception network on unrectified fisheye images to enable the vehicle to sense its surrounding environment. It consists of six primary tasks necessary for an autonomous driving system: depth estimation, visual odometry, semantic segmentation, motion segmentation, object detection, and lens soiling detection. We demonstrate that the jointly trained model performs better than the respective single task versions. Our multi-task model has a shared encoder providing a significant computational advantage and has synergized decoders where tasks support each other. We propose a novel camera geometry based adaptation mechanism to encode the fisheye distortion model both at training and inference. This was crucial to enable training on the WoodScape dataset, comprised of data from different parts of the world collected by 12 different cameras mounted on three different cars with different intrinsics and viewpoints. Given that bounding boxes is not a good representation for distorted fisheye images, we also extend object detection to use a polygon with non-uniformly sampled vertices. We additionally evaluate our model on standard automotive datasets, namely KITTI and Cityscapes. We obtain the state-of-the-art results on KITTI for depth estimation and pose estimation tasks and competitive performance on the other tasks. We perform extensive ablation studies on various architecture choices and task weighting methodologies. A short video at https://youtu.be/xbSjZ5OfPes provides qualitative results.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

OmniDet is a multi-task visual perception network for unrectified surround-view fisheye cameras that jointly performs depth/distance estimation, visual odometry, semantic segmentation, motion segmentation, object detection, and lens soiling detection. It reports that joint training with a shared encoder and synergized decoders outperforms single-task baselines and achieves state-of-the-art KITTI depth and pose results among monocular methods.

Key findings

  • The final WoodScape OmniDet (SAN10-patch) model reports RMSE 1.210, δ<1.25 0.929, semantic mIoU 78.9, motion mIoU 79.2, and detection mAP 74.1, improving over its own ablations without the proposed components.
  • Multi-task learning outperformed single-task models on WoodScape, KITTI, and Cityscapes; for example, on WoodScape the multi-task setting reached distance RMSE 1.332, semantic mIoU 76.6, motion mIoU 75.3, and detection mAP 68.4, while single-task values included distance RMSE 1.681, semantic mIoU 72.5, motion mIoU 68.1, and detection mAP 63.5.
  • VarNorm task weighting gave the best WoodScape task-weighting result: Sq.Rel 0.046, Abs.Rel 0.276, semantic mIoU 76.6, motion mIoU 75.3, and detection mAP 68.4, compared with equal weighting at Sq.Rel 0.058, Abs.Rel 0.302, semantic mIoU 70.3, motion mIoU 67.3, and detection mAP 64.6.
  • On KITTI, OmniDet reports state-of-the-art monocular depth and pose results: depth Abs.Rel 0.092, Sq.Rel 0.657, RMSE 3.984 on the Eigen split, and pose errors of 0.009 ± 0.004 on sequence 09 and 0.008 ± 0.005 on sequence 10 with GT; with online refinement, depth improves to Abs.Rel 0.077, Sq.Rel 0.641, RMSE 3.859.

Methods

  • The model uses a shared self-attention encoder with task-specific decoders for six tasks on unrectified fisheye images: distance/depth, pose/visual odometry, semantic segmentation, motion segmentation, object detection, and soiling segmentation.
  • Key components include a camera geometry tensor to encode fisheye distortion and camera intrinsics, VarNorm variance-based task weighting, semantically guided distance and detection decoders via pixel-adaptive convolutions, dynamic-object masking from motion/semantic segmentation, and a 24-sided non-uniform polygon representation for fisheye object detection.
  • Training and evaluation use WoodScape (10,000 images split 6:1:3, 12 cameras, three cars), KITTI, and Cityscapes; the model is trained in PyTorch for 20 epochs with batch size 24 on a Titan RTX, and inference is measured with TensorRT FP16 on NVIDIA Jetson AGX.

Limitations

  • The paper states that scaling to more tasks still faces practical challenges: building a diverse and balanced dataset, corner case mining, stable training mechanisms, and designing an optimal map representation that combines all tasks while reducing post-processing.
  • The paper states that the soiling dataset is independently built and cannot be trained jointly in a traditional manner; the shared encoder is frozen and only the soiling decoder is trained, and asynchronous backpropagation achieved the same accuracy.
  • Evident from the text: polygon detection on raw fisheye is limited to only two classes, pedestrians and vehicles; motion labels for KITTI and Cityscapes are available only for the cars category; and additional proprietary data was used for pre-training and initialization on WoodScape.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/lra.2021.3062324

Cites

54 of 54 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

23 Own interpretation · 12 Own result · 9 No full text of the sources · 6 Sources not found · 6 No basis given · 3 Couldn’t confirm · 1 Partly supported · 1 Not checked yet · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 29 claims

  • The quote only partly states this claim. 2
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 24
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 13
32 of 32
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Appearance variations of objects are larger due to spatially variant distortion, particularly for close-by objects.

    “Appearance variations of objects are larger due to the spatially variant distortion, particularly for close-by objects.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Fisheye perception is relatively less explored despite its prevalence.

    “Thus fisheye perception is a challenging task, however it is relatively less explored despite its prevalence.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Learning features for multiple tasks can act as a regularizer, improving generalization.

    “Furthermore, learning features for multiple tasks can act as a regularizer, improving generalization.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Semantic tasks typically require a large annotated dataset covering various objects, and it is infeasible to practically cover every possible object.

    “The semantic tasks typically require a large annotated dataset covering various objects.It is infeasible to practically cover every possible object.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The visual odometry task is required to place the detected objects in a temporally consistent map.

    “Finally, the visual odometry task is required to place the detected objects in a temporally consistent map.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Fisheye images have considerably larger homogeneous areas than their rectilinear counterpart.

    “as fisheye images have considerably larger homogeneous areas than their rectilinear counterpart.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Although the underlying camera intrinsics model is the same for a particular family of vehicles, manufacturing variations require calibration of each camera instance.

    “Although the underlying camera intrinsics model is the same for a particular family of vehicles, there are variations due to manufacturing processes, which require the calibration of each camera instance.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Calibration can vary after deployment due to high environmental temperature or aging.

    “Even after deployment, calibration can vary due to high environmental temperature or due to aging.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Public datasets have a single camera instance for both the training and test dataset.

    “This contrasts with public datasets, which have a single camera instance for both the training and test dataset.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    Dynamic objects violate the static world assumption.

    “As dynamic objects violate the static world assumption, information about their depth/distance is essential in autonomous driving; else, we would encounter the infinite depth issue during the inference stage and incur contamination to the reconstruction losses.”
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1 of 1

Citations

Cites

Show all 72 references

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. geiger, 0, Proc Conf Comput Vis Pattern Recognit, 3354

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Metadata

Authors
Ravi Kumar, V., Yogamani, S., Rashed, H., Sitsu, G., Witt, C., Leang, I., Milz, S., & Mader, P.
Affiliations
  • Valeo (Ireland) (IE)
  • Valeo (Germany) (DE)
  • Valeo (France) (FR)
  • Technische Universität Ilmenau (DE)
Venue
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Published
2021-04
Volume
6
Issue
2
Pages
2830-2837
ISSN
  • 2377-3766 (ISSN-L)
  • 2377-3774
OpenAlex
W3129414859
Cited by
121
References
72
Citations by year
2026: 15 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 26 · 2021: 12
FWCI
7.05
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Automotive Engineering › Autonomous Vehicle Technology and Safety
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Vision and Imaging
Keywords
surround-view cameras, fisheye images, multi-task learning, autonomous driving, depth estimation, visual odometry, semantic segmentation, motion segmentation, object detection, shared encoder, KITTI, cityscape

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