MonoLite3D: Lightweight 3D Object Properties Estimation

Reliable perception of the environment plays a crucial role in enabling efficient self-driving vehicles. Therefore, the perception system necessitates the acquisition of comprehensive 3D data regarding the surrounding objects within a specific time constrain, including their dimensions, spatial location and orientation. Deep learning has gained significant popularity in perception systems, enabling the conversion of image features captured by a camera into meaningful semantic information. This research paper introduces MonoLite3D network, an embedded-device friendly lightweight deep learning methodology designed for hardware environments with limited resources. MonoLite3D network is a cutting-edge technique that focuses on estimating multiple properties of 3D objects, encompassing their dimensions and spatial orientation, solely from monocular images. This approach is specifically designed to meet the requirements of resource-constrained environments, making it highly suitable for deployment on devices with limited computational capabilities. The experimental results validate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach on the orientation benchmark of the KITTI dataset. It achieves an impressive score of 82.27% on the moderate class and 69.81% on the hard class, while still meeting the real-time requirements.