Three-dimensional point clouds based on images and depth data

Abstract

Techniques are discussed herein for generating three-dimensional (3D) representations of an environment based on two-dimensional (2D) image data, and using the 3D representations to perform 3D object detection and other 3D analyses of the environment. 2D image data may be received, along with depth estimation data associated with the 2D image data. Using the 2D image data and associated depth data, an image-based object detector may generate 3D representations, including point clouds and/or 3D pixel grids, for the 2D image or particular regions of interest. In some examples, a 3D point cloud may be generated by projecting pixels from the 2D image into 3D space followed by a trained 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) performing object detection. Additionally or alternatively, a top-down view of a 3D pixel grid representation may be used to perform object detection using 2D convolutions.