An Adaptive Fusion Algorithm for Depth Completion

Abstract

Dense depth perception is critical for many applications. However, LiDAR sensors can only provide sparse depth measurements. Therefore, completing the sparse LiDAR data becomes an important task. Due to the rich textural information of RGB images, researchers commonly use synchronized RGB images to guide this depth completion. However, most existing depth completion methods simply fuse LiDAR information with RGB image information through feature concatenation or element-wise addition. In view of this, this paper proposes a method to adaptively fuse the information from these two sensors by generating different convolutional kernels according to the content and positions of the feature vectors. Specifically, we divided the features into different blocks and utilized an attention network to generate a different kernel weight for each block. These kernels were then applied to fuse the multi-modal features. Using the KITTI depth completion dataset, our method outperformed the state-of-the-art FCFR-Net method by 0.01 for the inverse mean absolute error (iMAE) metric. Furthermore, our method achieved a good balance of runtime and accuracy, which would make our method more suitable for some real-time applications.

Keywords

• depth completion
• depth estimation
• adaptive mechanism
• multi-modal fusion
• convolutional neural networks