RT Conference Proceedings T1 Sparse LiDAR and Stereo Fusion (SLS-Fusion) for Depth Estimation and 3D Object Detection A1 Mai, Nguyen-Anh-Minh A1 Duthon, Pierre A1 Khoudour, Louahdi A1 Crouzil, Alain A1 Velastin Carroza, Sergio Alejandro AB The ability to accurately detect and localize objects is recognized as being the most important for the perception of self-driving cars. From 2D to 3D object detection, the most difficult is to determine the distance from the ego-vehicle to objects. Expensive technology like LiDAR can provide a precise and accurate depth information, so most studies have tended to focus on this sensor showing a performance gap between LiDAR-based methods and camera-based methods. Although many authors have investigated how to fuse LiDAR with RGB cameras, as far as we know there are no studies to fuse LiDAR and stereo in a deep neural network for the 3D object detection task. This paper presents SLS-Fusion, a new approach to fuse data from 4-beam LiDAR and a stereo camera via a neural network for depth estimation to achieve better dense depth maps and thereby improves 3D object detection performance. Since 4-beam LiDAR is cheaper than the well-known 64-beam LiDAR, this approach is also classified as a low-cost sensors-based method. Through evaluation on the KITTI benchmark, it is shown that the proposed method significantly improves depth estimation performance compared to a baseline method. Also when applying it to 3D object detection, a new state of the art on low-cost sensor based method is achieved. PB IET Digital Library YR 2021 FD 2021-03-17 LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/32824 UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/32824 LA eng NO Procedings in: 11th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Systems (ICPRS-21), conference paper, 17-19 mar, 2021, Universidad de Talca, Curicó, Chile. DS e-Archivo RD 27 jul. 2024