Gated Fields: Learning Scene Reconstruction from Gated Videos

Reconstructing outdoor 3D scenes from temporal observations is a challenge that recent work on neural fields has offered a new avenue for. However, existing methods that recover scene properties, such as geometry, appearance, or radiance, solely from RGB captures often fail when handling poorly-lit or texture-deficient regions. Similarly, recovering scenes with scanning LiDAR sensors is also difficult due to their low angular sampling rate which makes recovering expansive real-world scenes difficult. Tackling these gaps, we introduce Gated Fields - a neural scene reconstruction method that utilizes active gated video sequences. To this end, we propose a neural rendering approach that seamlessly incorporates time-gated capture and illumination. Our method exploits the intrinsic depth cues in the gated videos, achieving precise and dense geometry reconstruction irrespective of ambient illumination conditions. We validate the method across day and night scenarios and find that Gated Fields compares favorably to RGB and LiDAR reconstruction methods. Our code and datasets are available at https://light.princeton.edu/gatedfields/.

HINT: Learning Complete Human Neural Representations from Limited Viewpoints

No augmented application is possible without animated humanoid avatars. At the same time, generating human replicas from real-world monocular hand-held or robotic sensor setups is challenging due to the limited availability of views. Previous work showed the feasibility of virtual avatars but required the presence of 360 degree views of the targeted subject. To address this issue, we propose HINT, a NeRF-based algorithm able to learn a detailed and complete human model from limited viewing angles. We achieve this by introducing a symmetry prior, regularization constraints, and training cues from large human datasets. In particular, we introduce a sagittal plane symmetry prior to the appearance of the human, directly supervise the density function of the human model using explicit 3D body modeling, and leverage a co-learned human digitization network as additional supervision for the unseen angles. As a result, our method can reconstruct complete humans even from a few viewing angles, increasing performance by more than 15% PSNR compared to previous state-of-the-art algorithms.

Real-Time Environment Condition Classification for Autonomous Vehicles

Current autonomous driving technologies are being rolled out in geo-fenced areas with well-defined operation conditions such as time of operation, area, weather conditions and road conditions. In this way, challenging conditions as adverse weather, slippery road or densely-populated city centers can be excluded. In order to lift the geo-fenced restriction and allow a more dynamic availability of autonomous driving functions, it is necessary for the vehicle to autonomously perform an environment condition assessment in real time to identify when the system cannot operate safely and either stop operation or require the resting passenger to take control. In particular, adverse-weather challenges are a fundamental limitation as sensor performance degenerates quickly, prohibiting the use of sensors such as cameras to locate and monitor road signs, pedestrians or other vehicles. To address this issue, we train a deep learning model to identify outdoor weather and dangerous road conditions, enabling a quick reaction to new situations and environments. We achieve this by introducing an improved taxonomy and label hierarchy for a state-of-the-art adverse-weather dataset, relabelling it with a novel semi-automated labeling pipeline. Using the novel proposed dataset and hierarchy, we train RECNet, a deep learning model for the classification of environment conditions from a single RGB frame. We outperform baseline models by relative 16% in F1- Score, while maintaining a real-time capable performance of 20 Hz.

Cross-spectral Gated-RGB Stereo Depth Estimation

Gated cameras flood-illuminate a scene and capture the time-gated impulse response of a scene. By employing nanosecond-scale gates, existing sensors are capable of capturing mega-pixel gated images, delivering dense depth improving on today's LiDAR sensors in spatial resolution and depth precision. Although gated depth estimation methods deliver a million of depth estimates per frame, their resolution is still an order below existing RGB imaging methods. In this work, we combine high-resolution stereo HDR RCCB cameras with gated imaging, allowing us to exploit depth cues from active gating, multi-view RGB and multi-view NIR sensing -- multi-view and gated cues across the entire spectrum. The resulting capture system consists only of low-cost CMOS sensors and flood-illumination. We propose a novel stereo-depth estimation method that is capable of exploiting these multi-modal multi-view depth cues, including the active illumination that is measured by the RCCB camera when removing the IR-cut filter. The proposed method achieves accurate depth at long ranges, outperforming the next best existing method by 39% for ranges of 100 to 220m in MAE on accumulated LiDAR ground-truth. Our code, models and datasets are available at https://light.princeton.edu/gatedrccbstereo/ .

Radar Fields: Frequency-Space Neural Scene Representations for FMCW Radar

Neural fields have been broadly investigated as scene representations for the reproduction and novel generation of diverse outdoor scenes, including those autonomous vehicles and robots must handle. While successful approaches for RGB and LiDAR data exist, neural reconstruction methods for radar as a sensing modality have been largely unexplored. Operating at millimeter wavelengths, radar sensors are robust to scattering in fog and rain, and, as such, offer a complementary modality to active and passive optical sensing techniques. Moreover, existing radar sensors are highly cost-effective and deployed broadly in robots and vehicles that operate outdoors. We introduce Radar Fields - a neural scene reconstruction method designed for active radar imagers. Our approach unites an explicit, physics-informed sensor model with an implicit neural geometry and reflectance model to directly synthesize raw radar measurements and extract scene occupancy. The proposed method does not rely on volume rendering. Instead, we learn fields in Fourier frequency space, supervised with raw radar data. We validate the effectiveness of the method across diverse outdoor scenarios, including urban scenes with dense vehicles and infrastructure, and in harsh weather scenarios, where mm-wavelength sensing is especially favorable.

Gated Stereo: Joint Depth Estimation from Gated and Wide-Baseline Active Stereo Cues

We propose Gated Stereo, a high-resolution and long-range depth estimation technique that operates on active gated stereo images. Using active and high dynamic range passive captures, Gated Stereo exploits multi-view cues alongside time-of-flight intensity cues from active gating. To this end, we propose a depth estimation method with a monocular and stereo depth prediction branch which are combined in a final fusion stage. Each block is supervised through a combination of supervised and gated self-supervision losses. To facilitate training and validation, we acquire a long-range synchronized gated stereo dataset for automotive scenarios. We find that the method achieves an improvement of more than 50 % MAE compared to the next best RGB stereo method, and 74 % MAE to existing monocular gated methods for distances up to 160 m. Our code,models and datasets are available here.

ScatterNeRF: Seeing Through Fog with Physically-Based Inverse Neural Rendering

Vision in adverse weather conditions, whether it be snow, rain, or fog is challenging. In these scenarios, scattering and attenuation severly degrades image quality. Handling such inclement weather conditions, however, is essential to operate autonomous vehicles, drones and robotic applications where human performance is impeded the most. A large body of work explores removing weather-induced image degradations with dehazing methods. Most methods rely on single images as input and struggle to generalize from synthetic fully-supervised training approaches or to generate high fidelity results from unpaired real-world datasets. With data as bottleneck and most of today's training data relying on good weather conditions with inclement weather as outlier, we rely on an inverse rendering approach to reconstruct the scene content. We introduce ScatterNeRF, a neural rendering method which adequately renders foggy scenes and decomposes the fog-free background from the participating media-exploiting the multiple views from a short automotive sequence without the need for a large training data corpus. Instead, the rendering approach is optimized on the multi-view scene itself, which can be typically captured by an autonomous vehicle, robot or drone during operation. Specifically, we propose a disentangled representation for the scattering volume and the scene objects, and learn the scene reconstruction with physics-inspired losses. We validate our method by capturing multi-view In-the-Wild data and controlled captures in a large-scale fog chamber.

Gated2Gated: Self-Supervised Depth Estimation from Gated Images

Gated cameras hold promise as an alternative to scanning LiDAR sensors with high-resolution 3D depth that is robust to back-scatter in fog, snow, and rain. Instead of sequentially scanning a scene and directly recording depth via the photon time-of-flight, as in pulsed LiDAR sensors, gated imagers encode depth in the relative intensity of a handful of gated slices, captured at megapixel resolution. Although existing methods have shown that it is possible to decode high-resolution depth from such measurements, these methods require synchronized and calibrated LiDAR to supervise the gated depth decoder -- prohibiting fast adoption across geographies, training on large unpaired datasets, and exploring alternative applications outside of automotive use cases. In this work, we fill this gap and propose an entirely self-supervised depth estimation method that uses gated intensity profiles and temporal consistency as a training signal. The proposed model is trained end-to-end from gated video sequences, does not require LiDAR or RGB data, and learns to estimate absolute depth values. We take gated slices as input and disentangle the estimation of the scene albedo, depth, and ambient light, which are then used to learn to reconstruct the input slices through a cyclic loss. We rely on temporal consistency between a given frame and neighboring gated slices to estimate depth in regions with shadows and reflections. We experimentally validate that the proposed approach outperforms existing supervised and self-supervised depth estimation methods based on monocular RGB and stereo images, as well as supervised methods based on gated images.

A Benchmark for Spray from Nearby Cutting Vehicles

Current driver assistance systems and autonomous driving stacks are limited to well-defined environment conditions and geo fenced areas. To increase driving safety in adverse weather conditions, broadening the application spectrum of autonomous driving and driver assistance systems is necessary. In order to enable this development, reproducible benchmarking methods are required to quantify the expected distortions. In this publication, a testing methodology for disturbances from spray is presented. It introduces a novel lightweight and configurable spray setup alongside an evaluation scheme to assess the disturbances caused by spray. The analysis covers an automotive RGB camera and two different LiDAR systems, as well as downstream detection algorithms based on YOLOv3 and PV-RCNN. In a common scenario of a closely cutting vehicle, it is visible that the distortions are severely affecting the perception stack up to four seconds showing the necessity of benchmarking the influences of spray.

Uncertainty depth estimation with gated images for 3D reconstruction

Gated imaging is an emerging sensor technology for self-driving cars that provides high-contrast images even under adverse weather influence. It has been shown that this technology can even generate high-fidelity dense depth maps with accuracy comparable to scanning LiDAR systems. In this work, we extend the recent Gated2Depth framework with aleatoric uncertainty providing an additional confidence measure for the depth estimates. This confidence can help to filter out uncertain estimations in regions without any illumination. Moreover, we show that training on dense depth maps generated by LiDAR depth completion algorithms can further improve the performance.