DeLS-3D: Deep Localization and Segmentation with a 3D Semantic Map

Abstract: For applications such as autonomous driving, self-localization/camera pose estimation and scene parsing are crucial technologies. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to tackle these two problems simultaneously. The uniqueness of our design is a sensor fusion scheme which integrates camera videos, motion sensors (GPS/IMU), and a 3D semantic map in order to achieve robustness and efficiency of the system. Specifically, we first have an initial coarse camera pose obtained from consumer-grade GPS/IMU, based on which a label map can be rendered from the 3D semantic map. Then, the rendered label map and the RGB image are jointly fed into a pose CNN, yielding a corrected camera pose. In addition, to incorporate temporal information, a multi-layer recurrent neural network (RNN) is further deployed improve the pose accuracy. Finally, based on the pose from RNN, we render a new label map, which is fed together with the RGB image into a segment CNN which produces per-pixel semantic label. In order to validate our approach, we build a dataset with registered 3D point clouds and video camera images. Both the point clouds and the images are semantically-labeled. Each video frame has ground truth pose from highly accurate motion sensors. We show that practically, pose estimation solely relying on images like PoseNet may fail due to street view confusion, and it is important to fuse multiple sensors. Finally, various ablation studies are performed, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. In particular, we show that scene parsing and pose estimation are mutually beneficial to achieve a more robust and accurate system.