Efficient Stereo Depth Estimation for Pseudo-LiDAR: A Self-Supervised Approach Based on Multi-Input ResNet Encoder

Perception and localization are essential for autonomous delivery vehicles, mostly estimated from 3D LiDAR sensors due to their precise distance measurement capability. This paper presents a strategy to obtain a real-time pseudo point cloud from image sensors (cameras) instead of laser-based sensors (LiDARs). Previous studies (such as PSMNet-based point cloud generation) built the algorithm based on accuracy but failed to operate in real time as LiDAR. We propose an approach to use different depth estimators to obtain pseudo point clouds similar to LiDAR to achieve better performance. Moreover, the depth estimator has used stereo imagery data to achieve more accurate depth estimation as well as point cloud results. Our approach to generating depth maps outperforms other existing approaches on KITTI depth prediction while yielding point clouds significantly faster than other approaches as well. Additionally, the proposed approach is evaluated on the KITTI stereo benchmark, where it shows effectiveness in runtime.