DeepBev: A conditional adversarial network for bird's eye view generation

Obtaining a meaningful, interpretable yet compact representation of the immediate surroundings of an autonomous vehicle is paramount for effective operation as well as safety. This paper proposes a solution to this by representing semantically important objects from a top-down, ego-centric bird's eye view. The novelty in this work is from formulating this problem as an adversarial learning task, tasking a generator model to produce bird's eye view representations which are plausible enough to be mistaken as a ground truth sample. This is achieved by using a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network based model conditioned on object detections from monocular RGB images and the corresponding bounding boxes. Extensive experiments show our model is more robust to novel data compared to strictly supervised benchmark models, while being a fraction of the size of the next best.