3D SURFACE STRUCTURE ESTIMATION USING NEURAL NETWORKS FOR AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS AND APPLICATIONS

In various examples, to support training a deep neural network (DNN) to predict a dense representation of a 3D surface structure of interest, a training dataset is generated using a simulated environment. For example, a simulation may be run to simulate a virtual world or environment, render frames of virtual sensor data (e.g., images), and generate corresponding depth maps and segmentation masks (identifying a component of the simulated environment such as a road). To generate input training data, 3D structure estimation may be performed on a rendered frame to generate a representation of a 3D surface structure of the road. To generate corresponding ground truth training data, a corresponding depth map and segmentation mask may be used to generate a dense representation of the 3D surface structure.