Simon de Moreau

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at PSL Research University, Mines Paris, in the “Perception and Machine Learning” team of the Center for Robotics (CAOR), under the supervision of Prof. Fabien Moutarde. My Ph.D. is conducted in collaboration with Valeo as part of an industrial partnership.

My research focuses on improving the robustness of computer vision at nighttime using HD headlights. The objective is to leverage the ability to project HD patterns with the vehicle’s headlights and to identify the specific patterns that can provide valuable insights to computer vision models, enhancing their understanding of the scene in challenging conditions. Improving computer vision robustness at night is crucial to ensuring the safety of Autonomous Driving and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.

Selected Publications

LED: Light Enhanced Depth Estimation at Night

Simon De Moreau, Yasser Almehio, Andrei Bursuc, and 3 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.08031, 2024

Abs arXiv Bib Code

Nighttime camera-based depth estimation is a highly challenging task, especially for autonomous driving applications, where accurate depth perception is essential for ensuring safe navigation. We aim to improve the reliability of perception systems at night time, where models trained on daytime data often fail in the absence of precise but costly LiDAR sensors. In this work, we introduce Light Enhanced Depth (LED), a novel cost-effective approach that significantly improves depth estimation in low-light environments by harnessing a pattern projected by high definition headlights available in modern vehicles. LED leads to significant performance boosts across multiple depth-estimation architectures (encoder-decoder, Adabins, DepthFormer) both on synthetic and real datasets. Furthermore, increased performances beyond illuminated areas reveal a holistic enhancement in scene understanding. Finally, we release the Nighttime Synthetic Drive Dataset, a new synthetic and photo-realistic nighttime dataset, which comprises 49,990 comprehensively annotated images.
@article{deMoreau2024led, title = {LED: Light Enhanced Depth Estimation at Night}, author = {De Moreau, Simon and Almehio, Yasser and Bursuc, Andrei and El-Idrissi, Hafid and Stanciulescu, Bogdan and Moutarde, Fabien}, journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.08031}, year = {2024}, }