# Pseudo-LiDAR Based Road Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13279 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13279/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03268/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [Similarity-Preserving Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.09682/) (2019)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07179/) (2018)
- [Evaluation: from precision, recall and F-measure to ROC, informedness, markedness and correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16061/) (2020)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [On the Efficacy of Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01348/) (2019)
- [Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04366/) (2015)
- [Correlation Congruence for Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01802/) (2019)
- [ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08545/) (2017)
- [Auto-DeepLab: Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02985/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00817/) (2019)
- [Enforcing geometric constraints of virtual normal for depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12209/) (2019)
- [Hierarchical Representations for Efficient Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00436/) (2017)
- [Pseudo-LiDAR++: Accurate Depth for 3D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06310/) (2019)
- [Efficient Multi-objective Neural Architecture Search via Lamarckian Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09081/) (2018)
- [Graph HyperNetworks for Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05749/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [RoadFormer: Duplex Transformer for RGB-Normal Semantic Road Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10356/) (2023)
- [RoadFormer+: Delivering RGB-X Scene Parsing through Scale-Aware Information Decoupling and Advanced Heterogeneous Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21631/) (2024)
- [SNE-RoadSegV2: Advancing Heterogeneous Feature Fusion and Fallibility Awareness for Freespace Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18918/) (2024)
- [RoadBEV: Road Surface Reconstruction in Bird's Eye View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06605/) (2024)
- [ESGN: Efficient Stereo Geometry Network for Fast 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14055/) (2021)
- [Depth Matters: Exploring Deep Interactions of RGB-D for Semantic Segmentation in Traffic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07995/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Road detection is a critically important task for self-driving cars. By employing LiDAR data, recent works have significantly improved the accuracy of road detection. Relying on LiDAR sensors limits the wide application of those methods when only cameras are available. In this paper, we propose a novel road detection approach with RGB being the only input during inference. Specifically, we exploit pseudo-LiDAR using depth estimation, and propose a feature fusion network where RGB and learned depth information are fused for improved road detection. To further optimize the network structure and improve the efficiency of the network. we search for the network structure of the feature fusion module using NAS techniques. Finally, be aware of that generating pseudo-LiDAR from RGB via depth estimation introduces extra computational costs and relies on depth estimation networks, we design a modality distillation strategy and leverage it to further free our network from these extra computational cost and dependencies during inference. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging benchmarks, KITTI and R2D.