GitNet: Geometric Prior-based Transformation for Birds-Eye-View Segmentation

Abstract: Birds-eye-view (BEV) semantic segmentation is critical for autonomous driving for its powerful spatial representation ability. It is challenging to estimate the BEV semantic maps from monocular images due to the spatial gap, since it is implicitly required to realize both the perspective-to-BEV transformation and segmentation. We present a novel two-stage Geometry Prior-based Transformation framework named GitNet, consisting of (i) the geometry-guided pre-alignment and (ii) ray-based transformer. In the first stage, we decouple the BEV segmentation into the perspective image segmentation and geometric prior-based mapping, with explicit supervision by projecting the BEV semantic labels onto the image plane to learn visibility-aware features and learnable geometry to translate into BEV space. Second, the pre-aligned coarse BEV features are further deformed by ray-based transformers to take visibility knowledge into account. GitNet achieves the leading performance on the challenging nuScenes and Argoverse Datasets.