Abstract:Autonomous driving systems benefit from high-definition (HD) maps that provide critical information about road infrastructure. The online construction of HD maps offers a scalable approach to generate local vectorized maps from onboard sensor observations. Existing methods commonly adopt bird's-eye-view (BEV) features as the intermediate scene representation, encoding the surrounding space with fixed-resolution dense grids. However, map elements are spatially sparse yet require fine-grained geometric localization, making uniformly allocated BEV representations redundant and less effective for vectorized map prediction. In this work, we propose GaussianMap, an online HD map construction framework that learns an adaptive Gaussian representation of the surrounding scene. This representation consists of a set of Gaussian primitives on the BEV plane, each encoding a flexible local region with geometric properties and a feature vector, allowing the model to allocate representational capacity to map-relevant regions. To generate such a representation from sensor observations, we introduce a feed-forward Gaussian encoder that progressively refines these primitives through Gaussian interaction modeling and multi-sensor feature aggregation. The refined Gaussian representation is then splatted into a BEV feature map and decoded into vectorized map predictions. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets demonstrate that GaussianMap achieves state-of-the-art performance in both camera-only and camera-LiDAR fusion settings. Our code will be made publicly available.




Abstract:The safe operation of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is highly dependent on their understanding of the surroundings. For this, the task of 3D semantic occupancy prediction divides the space around the sensors into voxels, and labels each voxel with both occupancy and semantic information. Recent perception models have used multisensor fusion to perform this task. However, existing multisensor fusion-based approaches focus mainly on using sensor information in the Cartesian coordinate system. This ignores the distribution of the sensor readings, leading to a loss of fine-grained details and performance degradation. In this paper, we propose OccCylindrical that merges and refines the different modality features under cylindrical coordinates. Our method preserves more fine-grained geometry detail that leads to better performance. Extensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes dataset, including challenging rainy and nighttime scenarios, confirm our approach's effectiveness and state-of-the-art performance. The code will be available at: https://github.com/DanielMing123/OccCylindrical
Abstract:Road damage can create safety and comfort challenges for both human drivers and autonomous vehicles (AVs). This damage is particularly prevalent in rural areas due to less frequent surveying and maintenance of roads. Automated detection of pavement deterioration can be used as an input to AVs and driver assistance systems to improve road safety. Current research in this field has predominantly focused on urban environments driven largely by public datasets, while rural areas have received significantly less attention. This paper introduces M2S-RoAD, a dataset for the semantic segmentation of different classes of road damage. M2S-RoAD was collected in various towns across New South Wales, Australia, and labelled for semantic segmentation to identify nine distinct types of road damage. This dataset will be released upon the acceptance of the paper.




Abstract:Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are being partially deployed and tested across various global locations, including China, the USA, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, and the UK, but with limited demonstrations in Australia. The integration of machine learning (ML) into AV perception systems highlights the need for locally labelled datasets to develop and test algorithms in specific environments. To address this, we introduce SydneyScapes - a dataset tailored for computer vision tasks of image semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation. This dataset, collected from Sydney and surrounding cities in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, consists of 756 images with high-quality pixel-level annotations. It is designed to assist AV industry and researchers by providing annotated data and tools for algorithm development, testing, and deployment in the Australian context. Additionally, we offer benchmarking results using state-of-the-art algorithms to establish reference points for future research and development. The dataset is publicly available at https://hdl.handle.net/2123/33051.