DaF-BEVSeg: Distortion-aware Fisheye Camera based Bird's Eye View Segmentation with Occlusion Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper introduces DaF-BEVSeg, a novel distortion-aware fisheye camera-based bird's eye view segmentation method that effectively handles occlusions without pre-undistortion, using a synthetic dataset for diverse conditions.

Contribution

The paper presents a new distortion-aware BEV segmentation approach for fisheye cameras, including a synthetic dataset, and demonstrates improved performance without image undistortion and with occlusion reasoning.

Findings

Better BEV segmentation performance without undistortion.

Effective occlusion reasoning improves scene understanding.

Synthetic dataset enables diverse condition testing.

Abstract

Semantic segmentation is an effective way to perform scene understanding. Recently, segmentation in 3D Bird's Eye View (BEV) space has become popular as its directly used by drive policy. However, there is limited work on BEV segmentation for surround-view fisheye cameras, commonly used in commercial vehicles. As this task has no real-world public dataset and existing synthetic datasets do not handle amodal regions due to occlusion, we create a synthetic dataset using the Cognata simulator comprising diverse road types, weather, and lighting conditions. We generalize the BEV segmentation to work with any camera model; this is useful for mixing diverse cameras. We implement a baseline by applying cylindrical rectification on the fisheye images and using a standard LSS-based BEV segmentation model. We demonstrate that we can achieve better performance without undistortion, which has the adverse effects of increased runtime due to pre-processing, reduced field-of-view, and resampling artifacts. Further, we introduce a distortion-aware learnable BEV pooling strategy that is more effective for the fisheye cameras. We extend the model with an occlusion reasoning module, which is critical for estimating in BEV space. Qualitative performance of DaF-BEVSeg is showcased in the video at https://streamable.com/ge4v51.