Depth estimation is an important part of the perception system in autonomous driving. Current studies often reconstruct dense depth maps from RGB images and sparse depth maps obtained from other sensors. However, existing methods often pay insufficient attention to latent semantic information. Considering the highly structured characteristics of driving scenes, we propose a dual-branch network to predict dense depth maps by fusing radar and RGB images. The driving scene is divided into three parts in the proposed architecture, each predicting a depth map, which is finally merged into one by implementing the fusion strategy in order to make full use of the potential semantic information in the driving scene. In addition, a variant L1 loss function is applied in the training phase, directing the network to focus more on those areas of interest when driving. Our proposed method is evaluated on the nuScenes dataset. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison with previous state of the art methods.
Keywords: camera; depth estimation; dual-branch network; radar.