APOLLOCAR3D: A large 3D car instance understanding benchmark for autonomous driving

Autonomous driving has attracted remarkable attention from both industry and academia. An important task is to estimate 3D properties (e.g. translation, rotation and shape) of a moving or parked vehicle on the road. This task, while critical, is still under-researched in the computer vision community-partially owing to the lack of large scale and fully-annotated 3D car database suitable for autonomous driving research. In this paper, we contribute the first large scale database suitable for 3D car instance understanding-ApolloCar3D. The dataset contains 5,277 driving images and over 60K car instances, where each car is fitted with an industry-grade 3D CAD model with absolute model size and semantically labelled keypoints. This dataset is above 20× larger than PASCAL3D+ and KITTI, the current state-of-the-art. To enable efficient labelling in 3D, we build a pipeline by considering 2D-3D keypoint correspondences for a single instance and 3D relationship among multiple instances. Equipped with such dataset, we build various baseline algorithms with the state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks. Specifically, we first segment each car with a pre-trained Mask R-CNN, and then regress towards its 3D pose and shape based on a deformable 3D car model with or without using semantic keypoints. We show that using keypoints significantly improves fitting performance. Finally, we develop a new 3D metric jointly considering 3D pose and 3D shape, allowing for comprehensive evaluation and ablation study.