Detecting Road Obstacles by Erasing Them

IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell. 2024 Apr;46(4):2450-2460. doi: 10.1109/TPAMI.2023.3335152. Epub 2024 Mar 6.

Abstract

Vehicles can encounter a myriad of obstacles on the road, and it is impossible to record them all beforehand to train a detector. Instead, we select image patches and inpaint them with the surrounding road texture, which tends to remove obstacles from those patches. We then use a network trained to recognize discrepancies between the original patch and the inpainted one, which signals an erased obstacle.