Mapping like a Skeptic: Probabilistic BEV Projection for Online HD Mapping

Constructing high-definition (HD) maps from sensory input requires accurately mapping the road elements in image space to the Bird's Eye View (BEV) space. The precision of this mapping directly impacts the quality of the final vectorized HD map. Existing HD mapping approaches outsource the projection to standard mapping techniques, such as attention-based ones. However, these methods struggle with accuracy due to generalization problems, often hallucinating non-existent road elements. Our key idea is to start with a geometric mapping based on camera parameters and adapt it to the scene to extract relevant map information from camera images. To implement this, we propose a novel probabilistic projection mechanism with confidence scores to (i) refine the mapping to better align with the scene and (ii) filter out irrelevant elements that should not influence HD map generation. In addition, we improve temporal processing by using confidence scores to selectively accumulate reliable information over time. Experiments on new splits of the nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets demonstrate improved performance over state-of-the-art approaches, indicating better generalization. The improvements are particularly pronounced on nuScenes and in the challenging long perception range. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/Fatih-Erdogan/mapping-like-skeptic .

Robust Bird's Eye View Segmentation by Adapting DINOv2

Extracting a Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation from multiple camera images offers a cost-effective, scalable alternative to LIDAR-based solutions in autonomous driving. However, the performance of the existing BEV methods drops significantly under various corruptions such as brightness and weather changes or camera failures. To improve the robustness of BEV perception, we propose to adapt a large vision foundational model, DINOv2, to BEV estimation using Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our approach builds on the strong representation space of DINOv2 by adapting it to the BEV task in a state-of-the-art framework, SimpleBEV. Our experiments show increased robustness of BEV perception under various corruptions, with increasing gains from scaling up the model and the input resolution. We also showcase the effectiveness of the adapted representations in terms of fewer learnable parameters and faster convergence during training.