Pix2Point: Learning Outdoor 3D Using Sparse Point Clouds and Optimal Transport

Abstract

Good quality reconstruction and comprehension of a scene rely on 3D estimation methods. The 3D information was usually obtained from images by stereophotogrammetry, but deep learning has recently provided us with excellent results for monocular depth estimation. Building up a sufficiently large and rich training dataset to achieve these results requires onerous processing. In this paper, we address the problem of learning outdoor 3D point cloud from monocular data using a sparse ground-truth dataset. We propose Pix2Point, a deep learning-based approach for monocular 3D point cloud prediction, able to deal with complete and challenging outdoor scenes. Our method relies on a 2D-3D hybrid neural network architecture, and a supervised end-to-end minimisation of an optimal transport divergence between point clouds. We show that, when trained on sparse point clouds, our simple promising approach achieves a better coverage of 3D outdoor scenes than efficient monocular depth methods.