Depth- and Semantics-aware Multi-modal Domain Translation: Generating 3D Panoramic Color Images from LiDAR Point Clouds

Abstract: This work presents a new depth- and semantics-aware conditional generative model, named TITAN-Next, for cross-domain image-to-image translation in a multi-modal setup between LiDAR and camera sensors. The proposed model leverages scene semantics as a mid-level representation and is able to translate raw LiDAR point clouds to RGB-D camera images by solely relying on semantic scene segments. We claim that this is the first framework of its kind and it has practical applications in autonomous vehicles such as providing a fail-safe mechanism and augmenting available data in the target image domain. The proposed model is evaluated on the large-scale and challenging Semantic-KITTI dataset, and experimental findings show that it considerably outperforms the original TITAN-Net and other strong baselines by 23.7$\%$ margin in terms of IoU.