In autonomous driving, 3D occupancy prediction outputs voxel-wise status and semantic labels for more comprehensive understandings of 3D scenes compared with traditional perception tasks, such as 3D object detection and bird's-eye view (BEV) semantic segmentation. Recent researchers have extensively explored various aspects of this task, including view transformation techniques, ground-truth label generation, and elaborate network design, aiming to achieve superior performance. However, the inference speed, crucial for running on an autonomous vehicle, is neglected. To this end, a new method, dubbed FastOcc, is proposed. By carefully analyzing the network effect and latency from four parts, including the input image resolution, image backbone, view transformation, and occupancy prediction head, it is found that the occupancy prediction head holds considerable potential for accelerating the model while keeping its accuracy. Targeted at improving this component, the time-consuming 3D convolution network is replaced with a novel residual-like architecture, where features are mainly digested by a lightweight 2D BEV convolution network and compensated by integrating the 3D voxel features interpolated from the original image features. Experiments on the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that our FastOcc achieves state-of-the-art results with a fast inference speed.
LiDAR and camera are two critical sensors for multi-modal 3D semantic segmentation and are supposed to be fused efficiently and robustly to promise safety in various real-world scenarios. However, existing multi-modal methods face two key challenges: 1) difficulty with efficient deployment and real-time execution; and 2) drastic performance degradation under weak calibration between LiDAR and cameras. To address these challenges, we propose CPGNet-LCF, a new multi-modal fusion framework extending the LiDAR-only CPGNet. CPGNet-LCF solves the first challenge by inheriting the easy deployment and real-time capabilities of CPGNet. For the second challenge, we introduce a novel weak calibration knowledge distillation strategy during training to improve the robustness against the weak calibration. CPGNet-LCF achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes and SemanticKITTI benchmarks. Remarkably, it can be easily deployed to run in 20ms per frame on a single Tesla V100 GPU using TensorRT TF16 mode. Furthermore, we benchmark performance over four weak calibration levels, demonstrating the robustness of our proposed approach.
Transfomer-based approaches advance the recent development of multi-camera 3D detection both in academia and industry. In a vanilla transformer architecture, queries are randomly initialised and optimised for the whole dataset, without considering the differences among input frames. In this work, we propose to leverage the predictions from an image backbone, which is often highly optimised for 2D tasks, as priors to the transformer part of a 3D detection network. The method works by (1). augmenting image feature maps with 2D priors, (2). sampling query locations via ray-casting along 2D box centroids, as well as (3). initialising query features with object-level image features. Experimental results shows that 2D priors not only help the model converge faster, but also largely improve the baseline approach by up to 12% in terms of average precision.
We propose DeepFusion, a modular multi-modal architecture to fuse lidars, cameras and radars in different combinations for 3D object detection. Specialized feature extractors take advantage of each modality and can be exchanged easily, making the approach simple and flexible. Extracted features are transformed into bird's-eye-view as a common representation for fusion. Spatial and semantic alignment is performed prior to fusing modalities in the feature space. Finally, a detection head exploits rich multi-modal features for improved 3D detection performance. Experimental results for lidar-camera, lidar-camera-radar and camera-radar fusion show the flexibility and effectiveness of our fusion approach. In the process, we study the largely unexplored task of faraway car detection up to 225 meters, showing the benefits of our lidar-camera fusion. Furthermore, we investigate the required density of lidar points for 3D object detection and illustrate implications at the example of robustness against adverse weather conditions. Moreover, ablation studies on our camera-radar fusion highlight the importance of accurate depth estimation.
In order to make autonomous driving a reality, artificial neural networks have to work reliably in the open-world. However, the open-world is vast and continuously changing, so it is not technically feasible to collect and annotate training datasets which accurately represent this domain. Therefore, there are always domain gaps between training datasets and the open-world which must be understood. In this work, we investigate the domain gaps between high-resolution and low-resolution LiDAR sensors in object detection networks. Using a unique dataset, which enables us to study sensor resolution domain gaps independent of other effects, we show two distinct domain gaps - an inference domain gap and a training domain gap. The inference domain gap is characterised by a strong dependence on the number of LiDAR points per object, while the training gap shows no such dependence. These fndings show that different approaches are required to close these inference and training domain gaps.
Detecting dynamic objects and predicting static road information such as drivable areas and ground heights are crucial for safe autonomous driving. Previous works studied each perception task separately, and lacked a collective quantitative analysis. In this work, we show that it is possible to perform all perception tasks via a simple and efficient multi-task network. Our proposed network, LidarMTL, takes raw LiDAR point cloud as inputs, and predicts six perception outputs for 3D object detection and road understanding. The network is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with 3D sparse convolution and deconvolution operations. Extensive experiments verify the proposed method with competitive accuracies compared to state-of-the-art object detectors and other task-specific networks. LidarMTL is also leveraged for online localization. Code and pre-trained model have been made available at https://github.com/frankfengdi/LidarMTL.
The availability of many real-world driving datasets is a key reason behind the recent progress of object detection algorithms in autonomous driving. However, there exist ambiguity or even failures in object labels due to error-prone annotation process or sensor observation noise. Current public object detection datasets only provide deterministic object labels without considering their inherent uncertainty, as does the common training process or evaluation metrics for object detectors. As a result, an in-depth evaluation among different object detection methods remains challenging, and the training process of object detectors is sub-optimal, especially in probabilistic object detection. In this work, we infer the uncertainty in bounding box labels from LiDAR point clouds based on a generative model, and define a new representation of the probabilistic bounding box through a spatial uncertainty distribution. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed model reflects complex environmental noises in LiDAR perception and the label quality. Furthermore, we propose Jaccard IoU (JIoU) as a new evaluation metric that extends IoU by incorporating label uncertainty. We conduct an in-depth comparison among several LiDAR-based object detectors using the JIoU metric. Finally, we incorporate the proposed label uncertainty in a loss function to train a probabilistic object detector and to improve its detection accuracy. We verify our proposed methods on two public datasets (KITTI, Waymo), as well as on simulation data. Code is released at https://bit.ly/2W534yo.
Capturing uncertainty in object detection is indispensable for safe autonomous driving. In recent years, deep learning has become the de-facto approach for object detection, and many probabilistic object detectors have been proposed. However, there is no summary on uncertainty estimation in deep object detection, and existing methods are not only built with different network architectures and uncertainty estimation methods, but also evaluated on different datasets with a wide range of evaluation metrics. As a result, a comparison among methods remains challenging, as does the selection of a model that best suits a particular application. This paper aims to alleviate this problem by providing a review and comparative study on existing probabilistic object detection methods for autonomous driving applications. First, we provide an overview of generic uncertainty estimation in deep learning, and then systematically survey existing methods and evaluation metrics for probabilistic object detection. Next, we present a strict comparative study for probabilistic object detection based on an image detector and three public autonomous driving datasets. Finally, we present a discussion of the remaining challenges and future works. Code has been made available at https://github.com/asharakeh/pod_compare.git
Reliable uncertainty estimation is crucial for robust object detection in autonomous driving. However, previous works on probabilistic object detection either learn predictive probability for bounding box regression in an un-supervised manner, or use simple heuristics to do uncertainty regularization. This leads to unstable training or suboptimal detection performance. In this work, we leverage our previously proposed method for estimating uncertainty inherent in ground truth bounding box parameters (which we call label uncertainty) to improve the detection accuracy of a probabilistic LiDAR-based object detector. Experimental results on the KITTI dataset show that our method surpasses both the baseline model and the models based on simple heuristics by up to 3.6% in terms of Average Precision.
Lane detection is an essential part of the perception module of any automated driving (AD) or advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). So far, model-driven approaches for the detection of lane markings proved sufficient. More recently, however data-driven approaches have been proposed that show superior results. These deep learning approaches typically propose a classification of the free-space using for example semantic segmentation. While these examples focus and optimize on unmarked inner-city roads, we believe that mapless driving in complex highway scenarios is still not handled with sufficient robustness and availability. Especially in challenging weather situations such as heavy rain, fog at night or reflections in puddles, the reliable detection of lane markings will decrease significantly or completely fail with low-cost video-only AD systems. Therefore, we propose to specifically classify a drivable corridor in the ego-lane on a pixel level with a deep learning approach. Our approach is intentionally kept simple with only 660k parameters. Thus, we were able to easily integrate our algorithm into an online AD system of a test vehicle. We demonstrate the performance of our approach under challenging conditions qualitatively and quantitatively in comparison to a state-of-the-art model-driven approach. We see the current approach as a fallback method whenever a model-driven approach cannot cope with a specific scenario. Due to this, a fallback method does not have to fulfill the same requirements on comfort in lateral control as the primary algorithm: Its task is to catch the temporal shortcomings of the main perception task.