Obstacle Detection for USVs by Joint Stereo-View Semantic Segmentation

We propose a stereo-based obstacle detection approach for unmanned surface vehicles. Obstacle detection is cast as a scene semantic segmentation problem in which pixels are assigned a probability of belonging to water or non-water regions. We extend a single-view model to a stereo system by adding a constraint which prefers consistent class labels assignment to pixels in the left and right camera images corresponding to the same parts of a 3D scene. Our approach jointly fits a semantic model to both images, leading to an improved class-label posterior map from which obstacles and water edge are extracted. In overall F-measure, our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art monocular approach by 0.495, a monocular CNN by 0.798 and their stereo extensions by 0.059 and 0.515, respectively on the task of obstacle detection while running real-time on a single CPU.