Extending Single Beam Lidar To Full Resolution By Fusing With Single Image Depth Estimation

Depth estimation is playing an important role in indoor and outdoor scene understanding, autonomous driving, augmented reality and many other tasks. Vehicles and robotics are able to use active illumination sensors such as LIDAR to receive high precision depth estimation. However, high-resolution LIDARs are usually too expensive, which limits its massive production on various applications. Though single beam LIDAR enjoys the benefits of low cost, one beam depth sensing is not usually sufficient to perceive the surrounding environment in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based framework to explore to replicate similar or even higher performance as costly LIDARs with our designed self-supervised network and a low-cost single-beam LIDAK. After the accurate calibration with a visible camera, the single beam LIDAR can adjust the scale uncertainty of the depth map estimated by the visible camera. The adjusted depth map enjoys the benefits of high resolution and sensing accuracy as high beam LIDAR and maintains low-cost as single beam LIDAR. Thus we can achieve similar sensing effect of high beam LIDAR with more than a 30-100 times cheaper price (e.g., $80000 Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR v.s. $2000 SICK TIM-781 2D LIDAR and normal camera). The proposed approach is verified on our collected dataset and public dataset with superior depth-sensing performance.