1. [Publications](/publications) 2. Binary TTC: A Temporal Geofence for Autonomous Navigation # Binary TTC: A Temporal Geofence for Autonomous Navigation ![](/sites/default/files/publications/teaser.gif) *Time-to-contact (TTC), the time for an object to collide with the observer's plane, is a powerful tool for path planning: it is potentially more informative than the depth, velocity, and acceleration of objects in the scene---even for humans. TTC presents several advantages, including requiring only a monocular, uncalibrated camera. However, regressing TTC for each pixel is not straightforward, and most existing methods make over-simplifying assumptions about the scene. We address this challenge by estimating TTC via a series of simpler, binary classifications. We predict with* low latency *whether the observer will collide with an obstacle* within a certain time, *which is often more critical than knowing exact, per-pixel TTC. For such scenarios, our method offers a temporal geofence in 6.4 ms---over 25x faster than existing methods. Our approach can also estimate per-pixel TTC with arbitrarily fine quantization (including continuous values), when the computational budget allows for it. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to offer TTC information (binary or coarsely quantized) at sufficiently high frame-rates for practical use.* **Best Student Paper Honorable Mention** ## Authors [Abhishek Badki](/person/abhishek-badki) Orazio Gallo (NVIDIA) [Jan Kautz](/person/jan-kautz) Pradeep Sen (UC Santa Barbara) ## Publication Date Saturday, June 19, 2021 ## Published in [IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2021](https://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/) ## Research Area [Autonomous Vehicles](/research-area/autonomous-vehicles) [Computational Photography and Imaging](/research-area/computational-photography-imaging) [Computer Vision](/research-area/computer-vision) ## External Links [Teaser Video](https://youtu.be/uUQJcjyerM4) [Official project page (with code)](https://github.com/NVlabs/BiTTC) [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.04777) ## Award Best Student Paper Honorable Mention, CVPR 2021 ## Copyright This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to .