Radar Meets Vision: Robustifying Monocular Metric Depth Prediction for Mobile Robotics

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Job, Marco, Stastny, Thomas, Kazik, Tim, Siegwart, Roland, Pantic, Michael
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Job, Marco
Stastny, Thomas
Kazik, Tim
Siegwart, Roland
Pantic, Michael
author_facet Job, Marco
Stastny, Thomas
Kazik, Tim
Siegwart, Roland
Pantic, Michael
contents Mobile robots require accurate and robust depth measurements to understand and interact with the environment. While existing sensing modalities address this problem to some extent, recent research on monocular depth estimation has leveraged the information richness, yet low cost and simplicity of monocular cameras. These works have shown significant generalization capabilities, mainly in automotive and indoor settings. However, robots often operate in environments with limited scale cues, self-similar appearances, and low texture. In this work, we encode measurements from a low-cost mmWave radar into the input space of a state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation model. Despite the radar's extreme point cloud sparsity, our method demonstrates generalization and robustness across industrial and outdoor experiments. Our approach reduces the absolute relative error of depth predictions by 9-64% across a range of unseen, real-world validation datasets. Importantly, we maintain consistency of all performance metrics across all experiments and scene depths where current vision-only approaches fail. We further address the present deficit of training data in mobile robotics environments by introducing a novel methodology for synthesizing rendered, realistic learning datasets based on photogrammetric data that simulate the radar sensor observations for training. Our code, datasets, and pre-trained networks are made available at https://github.com/ethz-asl/radarmeetsvision.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_00736
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Radar Meets Vision: Robustifying Monocular Metric Depth Prediction for Mobile Robotics
Job, Marco
Stastny, Thomas
Kazik, Tim
Siegwart, Roland
Pantic, Michael
Robotics
Mobile robots require accurate and robust depth measurements to understand and interact with the environment. While existing sensing modalities address this problem to some extent, recent research on monocular depth estimation has leveraged the information richness, yet low cost and simplicity of monocular cameras. These works have shown significant generalization capabilities, mainly in automotive and indoor settings. However, robots often operate in environments with limited scale cues, self-similar appearances, and low texture. In this work, we encode measurements from a low-cost mmWave radar into the input space of a state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation model. Despite the radar's extreme point cloud sparsity, our method demonstrates generalization and robustness across industrial and outdoor experiments. Our approach reduces the absolute relative error of depth predictions by 9-64% across a range of unseen, real-world validation datasets. Importantly, we maintain consistency of all performance metrics across all experiments and scene depths where current vision-only approaches fail. We further address the present deficit of training data in mobile robotics environments by introducing a novel methodology for synthesizing rendered, realistic learning datasets based on photogrammetric data that simulate the radar sensor observations for training. Our code, datasets, and pre-trained networks are made available at https://github.com/ethz-asl/radarmeetsvision.
title Radar Meets Vision: Robustifying Monocular Metric Depth Prediction for Mobile Robotics
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.00736