GUPNet++: Geometry Uncertainty Propagation Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Geometry plays a significant role in monocular 3D object detection. It can be used to estimate object depth by using the perspective projection between object's physical size and 2D projection in the image plane, which can introduce mathematical priors into deep models. However, this projection process also introduces error amplification, where the error of the estimated height is amplified and reflected into the projected depth. It leads to unreliable depth inferences and also impairs training stability. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Geometry Uncertainty Propagation Network (GUPNet++) by modeling geometry projection in a probabilistic manner. This ensures depth predictions are well-bounded and associated with a reasonable uncertainty. The significance of introducing such geometric uncertainty is two-fold: (1). It models the uncertainty propagation relationship of the geometry projection during training, improving the stability and efficiency of the end-to-end model learning. (2). It can be derived to a highly reliable confidence to indicate the quality of the 3D detection result, enabling more reliable detection inference. Experiments show that the proposed approach not only obtains (state-of-the-art) SOTA performance in image-based monocular 3D detection but also demonstrates superiority in efficacy with a simplified framework.