Abstract
Current approaches to semantic image and scene understanding typically employ rather simple object representations such as 2D or 3D bounding boxes. While such coarse models are robust and allow for reliable object detection, they discard much of the information about objects’ 3D shape and pose, and thus do not lend themselves well to higher-level reasoning. Here, we propose to base scene understanding on a high-resolution object representation. An object class—in our case cars—is modeled as a deformable 3D wireframe, which enables fine-grained modeling at the level of individual vertices and faces. We augment that model to explicitly include vertex-level occlusion, and embed all instances in a common coordinate frame, in order to infer and exploit object-object interactions. Specifically, from a single view we jointly estimate the shapes and poses of multiple objects in a common 3D frame. A ground plane in that frame is estimated by consensus among different objects, which significantly stabilizes monocular 3D pose estimation. The fine-grained model, in conjunction with the explicit 3D scene model, further allows one to infer part-level occlusions between the modeled objects, as well as occlusions by other, unmodeled scene elements. To demonstrate the benefits of such detailed object class models in the context of scene understanding we systematically evaluate our approach on the challenging KITTI street scene dataset. The experiments show that the model’s ability to utilize image evidence at the level of individual parts improves monocular 3D pose estimation w.r.t. both location and (continuous) viewpoint.
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While in the earlier work they were scaled to the same size, so as to keep the deformations from the mean shape small.
In practice this amounts to a look-up in the precomputed response maps.
Note, there is no 3D counterpart to this part-level evaluation, since we see no way to obtain sufficiently accurate 3D part annotations.
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This work has been supported by the Max Planck Center for Visual Computing & Communication.
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Communicated by Derek Hoiem, James Hays, Jianxiong Xiao and Aditya Khosla.
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Zia, M.Z., Stark, M. & Schindler , K. Towards Scene Understanding with Detailed 3D Object Representations. Int J Comput Vis 112, 188–203 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-014-0780-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-014-0780-y