W6DNet: Weakly Supervised Domain Adaptation for Monocular Vehicle 6-D Pose Estimation With 3-D Priors and Synthetic Data
 
W6DNet: Weakly Supervised Domain Adaptation for Monocular Vehicle 6-D Pose Estimation With 3-D Priors and Synthetic Data 
 
Yangxintong Lyu, Yangxintong Lyu, Remco Royen, Remco Royen, Adrian Munteanu, Adrian Munteanu
 
Abstract 

Synthetic traffic datasets provide highly accurate and affordable annotations, which are of crucial importance in complex vision-based perception tasks performed on real-world traffic data. Due to the lack of paired 2-D–3-D data, it remains very challenging when adapting the knowledge of a vehicle{\textquoteright}s pose in SE(3) with its known 3-D geometry. In this article, we first propose a synthetic dataset, SynthV6D, enabling 6-D pose estimation of vehicles in monocular traffic images. The dataset comprises industrial-grade vehicles in motion evolving in realistic virtual scenery, covering a wide range of viewpoints and distances. Second, we introduce a weakly supervised domain adaptation approach, dubbed W6DNet, to recover the 6-D pose. To this end, by using the synthetic dataset, a novel linked image feature space-based domain adaptation is introduced. Furthermore, an original two-step double-fusion block is proposed to fuse the multi-modal data representations and the cross-space features. Consequently, the proposed method learns the pose-specific embeddings. We evaluate W6DNet on the real-world ApolloCar3D dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that, when a small amount of real-world data is accessible, the proposed approach can significantly advance the performance when adapting knowledge from SynthV6D. Moreover, it achieves competitive performance compared to fully supervised state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/YangLyu-123/TIM-W6DNet.git .