IDA-3D: Instance-Depth-Aware 3D Object Detection From Stereo Vision for Autonomous Driving

3D object detection is an important scene understanding task in autonomous driving and virtual reality. Approaches based on LiDAR technology have high performance, but LiDAR is expensive. Considering more general scenes, where there is no LiDAR data in the 3D datasets, we propose a 3D object detection approach from stereo vision which does not rely on LiDAR data either as input or as supervision in training, but solely takes RGB images with corresponding annotated 3D bounding boxes as training data. As depth estimation of object is the key factor affecting the performance of 3D object detection, we introduce an Instance-DepthAware (IDA) module which accurately predicts the depth of the 3D bounding box’s center by instance-depth awareness, disparity adaptation and matching cost reweighting. Moreover, our model is an end-to-end learning framework which does not require multiple stages or postprocessing algorithm. We provide detailed experiments on KITTI benchmark and achieve impressive improvements compared with the existing image-based methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/swords123/IDA-3D.