Deep Architecture With Cross Guidance Between Single Image and Sparse LiDAR Data for Depth Completion

It is challenging to apply depth maps generated from sparse laser scan data to computer vision tasks, such as robot vision and autonomous driving, because of the sparsity and noise in the data. To overcome this problem, depth completion tasks have been proposed to produce a dense depth map from sparse LiDAR data and a single RGB image. In this study, we developed a deep convolutional architecture with cross guidance for multi-modal feature fusion to compensate for the lack of representation power of their modality. Two encoders, which are part of the proposed architecture, receive different modalities as inputs. They interact with each other by exchanging information in each stage through the attention mechanism during encoding. We also propose a residual atrous spatial pyramid block, comprising multiple dilated convolutions with different dilation rates, which are used to derive highly significant features. The experimental results of the KITTI depth completion benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed architecture shows higher performance than that of the other models trained in a two-dimensional space without pre-training or fine-tuning other datasets.