Linear Inverse Problem for Depth Completion with RGB Image and Sparse LIDAR Fusion

Comprehensive depth information from surrounding scenes is important for perception in autonomous driving and robots. Sparse LIDAR sensors give a low-density point cloud of the environment, but are more affordable than their high-density counterparts. In this paper, we propose a novel sensor fusion architecture for sparse LIDAR depth completion. Instead of the traditional end-to-end neural network-based algorithm, we formulate depth completion as a Linear Inverse Problem (LIP) with a multi-modal proximal operator. This sensor fusion architecture allows a better signal prior and finds the unique optimal solution to the LIP. Instead of learning a unified network for the sparse input which treats pixels evenly, the proposed architecture guarantees both the data consistency and smoothness of the predicted depth map. To demonstrate the performance of our algorithm, we benchmark on the simulation dataset TartanAir, and the real indoor NYUdepthv2 and real outdoor KITTI datasets. Our proposed method outperforms previous methods and uses fewer parameters in both indoor and outdoor datasets.