Simple linear iterative clustering based low-cost pseudo-LiDAR for 3D object detection in autonomous driving

The paper presents a low-cost and LiDAR-free approach to efficiently detect 3D objects from stereo camera images, towards autonomous driving applications. It is first proposed to exploit the simple linear iterative clustering algorithm to segment stereo images into superpixel feature maps. The segmented superpixel maps are then used to estimate a depth map. By utilizing the depth map and stereo images, a 3D point cloud can be generated; and the 3D data is considered as pseudo-LiDAR representation as it is similar to measurements collected by a LiDAR sensor. The generated pseudo-LiDAR point cloud can ultimately be fed into any the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D object detection techniques to localize objects. By doing this, the proposed approach can effectively detect 3D objects by only employing low-cost stereo cameras, which can save tens of thousands of dollars on LiDAR costs from the existing LiDAR based methods. Effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was evaluated in the real-world KITTI dataset where the obtained results are about 1.33% better than those obtained by the benchmarking pseudo-LiDAR++ method (You et al. 2020).