ST-DepthNet: A Spatio-Temporal Deep Network for Depth Completion Using a Single Non-Repetitive Circular Scanning Lidar

In this letter, we propose a novel depth image completion technique based on sparse consecutive measurements of a non-repetitive circular scanning (NRCS) Lidar, demonstrating the capabilities of a new, compact, and accessible sensor technology for dense range mapping of highly dynamic scenes. Our deep network called
ST-DepthNet
is composed of a spatio-temporally (ST) extended U-Net architecture, which accepts a very sparse range data sequence as input and produces a dense depth image stream of the same field-of-view ensuring a high level of spatial details and accuracy. For evaluation, we have constructed a new urban dataset, that – to our best knowledge as the first open Benchmark in this field – comprises various simulated and real-world NRCS Lidar data samples, allowing us to simultaneously train our model on synthetic data with Ground Truth, and to validate the result via real NRCS Lidar measurements. Using this new dataset, we have shown the superiority of our method against a densified depth map obtained from the raw sensor stream, and against two independent state-of-the-art deep-learning based Lidar-only depth completion methods.