Up-to-date High-Definition (HD) maps are essential for self-driving cars. To achieve constantly updated HD maps, we present a deep neural network (DNN), Diff-Net, to detect changes in them. Compared to traditional methods based on object detectors, the essential design in our work is a parallel feature difference calculation structure that infers map changes by comparing features extracted from the camera and rasterized images. To generate these rasterized images, we project map elements onto images in the camera view, yielding meaningful map representations that can be consumed by a DNN accordingly. As we formulate the change detection task as an object detection problem, we leverage the anchor-based structure that predicts bounding boxes with different change status categories. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first end-to-end network that tackles the high-definition map change detection task, yielding a single stage solution. Furthermore, rather than relying on single frame input, we introduce a spatio-temporal fusion module that fuses features from history frames into the current, thus improving the overall performance. Finally, we comprehensively validate our method's effectiveness using freshly collected datasets. Results demonstrate that our Diff-Net achieves better performance than the baseline methods and is ready to be integrated into a map production pipeline maintaining an up-to-date HD map.

Learning depth from a single image is an important issue in computer vision. To solve this problem, encoder-decoder architect is usually employed as a powerful architecture to learn the dense corresponding function. In this work, we propose a symmetrical Spindle network of the encoder-decoder to learn the fine-grained depth. Unlike traditional convolution neural network, we first boost up the feature maps from low-dimension space to a high-dimension space, then extract the features for monocular depth learning. In order to overcome limitation of the computer memory, a single image super-resolution technique is proposed to replace the boosting process by fusing local cues in edge direction. Given the super-resolution images, the monocular depth learning needs more global information than most architectures for pixel-wise predictions. To address this issue, dilation kernel method is proposed to enlarge the receptive field in each layer. For the task of the super-resolution, the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on the monocular depth inference demonstrate that the Spindle network could achieve comparable performance on the NYU and Make3D datasets, compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. The proposed method reveals a new perspective to learn the depth from a single image, which shows a promising generality to other pixel-wise prediction problems.

Learning depth from a single image, as an important issue in scene understanding, has attracted a lot of attention in the past decade. The accuracy of the depth estimation has been improved from conditional Markov random fields, non-parametric methods, to deep convolutional neural networks most recently. However, there exist inherent ambiguities in recovering 3D from a single 2D image. In this paper, we first prove the ambiguity between the focal length and monocular depth learning, and verify the result using experiments, showing that the focal length has a great influence on accurate depth recovery. In order to learn monocular depth by embedding the focal length, we propose a method to generate synthetic varying-focal-length dataset from fixed-focal-length datasets, and a simple and effective method is implemented to fill the holes in the newly generated images. For the sake of accurate depth recovery, we propose a novel deep neural network to infer depth through effectively fusing the middle-level information on the fixed-focal-length dataset, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods built on pretrained VGG. Furthermore, the newly generated varying-focallength dataset is taken as input to the proposed network in both learning and inference phases. Extensive experiments on the fixed- and varying-focal-length datasets demonstrate that the learned monocular depth with embedded focal length is significantly improved compared to that without embedding the focal length information.