Optimizing the Placement of Roadside LiDARs for Autonomous Driving

Multi-agent cooperative perception is an increasingly popular topic in the field of autonomous driving, where roadside LiDARs play an essential role. However, how to optimize the placement of roadside LiDARs is a crucial but often overlooked problem. This paper proposes an approach to optimize the placement of roadside LiDARs by selecting optimized positions within the scene for better perception performance. To efficiently obtain the best combination of locations, a greedy algorithm based on perceptual gain is proposed, which selects the location that can maximize the perceptual gain sequentially. We define perceptual gain as the increased perceptual capability when a new LiDAR is placed. To obtain the perception capability, we propose a perception predictor that learns to evaluate LiDAR placement using only a single point cloud frame. A dataset named Roadside-Opt is created using the CARLA simulator to facilitate research on the roadside LiDAR placement problem.

UniSeg: A Unified Multi-Modal LiDAR Segmentation Network and the OpenPCSeg Codebase

Point-, voxel-, and range-views are three representative forms of point clouds. All of them have accurate 3D measurements but lack color and texture information. RGB images are a natural complement to these point cloud views and fully utilizing the comprehensive information of them benefits more robust perceptions. In this paper, we present a unified multi-modal LiDAR segmentation network, termed UniSeg, which leverages the information of RGB images and three views of the point cloud, and accomplishes semantic segmentation and panoptic segmentation simultaneously. Specifically, we first design the Learnable cross-Modal Association (LMA) module to automatically fuse voxel-view and range-view features with image features, which fully utilize the rich semantic information of images and are robust to calibration errors. Then, the enhanced voxel-view and range-view features are transformed to the point space,where three views of point cloud features are further fused adaptively by the Learnable cross-View Association module (LVA). Notably, UniSeg achieves promising results in three public benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, and Waymo Open Dataset (WOD); it ranks 1st on two challenges of two benchmarks, including the LiDAR semantic segmentation challenge of nuScenes and panoptic segmentation challenges of SemanticKITTI. Besides, we construct the OpenPCSeg codebase, which is the largest and most comprehensive outdoor LiDAR segmentation codebase. It contains most of the popular outdoor LiDAR segmentation algorithms and provides reproducible implementations. The OpenPCSeg codebase will be made publicly available at https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/PCSeg.

LimSim: A Long-term Interactive Multi-scenario Traffic Simulator

With the growing popularity of digital twin and autonomous driving in transportation, the demand for simulation systems capable of generating high-fidelity and reliable scenarios is increasing. Existing simulation systems suffer from a lack of support for different types of scenarios, and the vehicle models used in these systems are too simplistic. Thus, such systems fail to represent driving styles and multi-vehicle interactions, and struggle to handle corner cases in the dataset. In this paper, we propose LimSim, the Long-term Interactive Multi-scenario traffic Simulator, which aims to provide a long-term continuous simulation capability under the urban road network. LimSim can simulate fine-grained dynamic scenarios and focus on the diverse interactions between multiple vehicles in the traffic flow. This paper provides a detailed introduction to the framework and features of the LimSim, and demonstrates its performance through case studies and experiments. LimSim is now open source on GitHub: https://www.github.com/PJLab-ADG/LimSim .

Human-like Decision-making at Unsignalized Intersection using Social Value Orientation

With the commercial application of automated vehicles (AVs), the sharing of roads between AVs and human-driven vehicles (HVs) becomes a common occurrence in the future. While research has focused on improving the safety and reliability of autonomous driving, it's also crucial to consider collaboration between AVs and HVs. Human-like interaction is a required capability for AVs, especially at common unsignalized intersections, as human drivers of HVs expect to maintain their driving habits for inter-vehicle interactions. This paper uses the social value orientation (SVO) in the decision-making of vehicles to describe the social interaction among multiple vehicles. Specifically, we define the quantitative calculation of the conflict-involved SVO at unsignalized intersections to enhance decision-making based on the reinforcement learning method. We use naturalistic driving scenarios with highly interactive motions for performance evaluation of the proposed method. Experimental results show that SVO is more effective in characterizing inter-vehicle interactions than conventional motion state parameters like velocity, and the proposed method can accurately reproduce naturalistic driving trajectories compared to behavior cloning.

DetZero: Rethinking Offboard 3D Object Detection with Long-term Sequential Point Clouds

Existing offboard 3D detectors always follow a modular pipeline design to take advantage of unlimited sequential point clouds. We have found that the full potential of offboard 3D detectors is not explored mainly due to two reasons: (1) the onboard multi-object tracker cannot generate sufficient complete object trajectories, and (2) the motion state of objects poses an inevitable challenge for the object-centric refining stage in leveraging the long-term temporal context representation. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel paradigm of offboard 3D object detection, named DetZero. Concretely, an offline tracker coupled with a multi-frame detector is proposed to focus on the completeness of generated object tracks. An attention-mechanism refining module is proposed to strengthen contextual information interaction across long-term sequential point clouds for object refining with decomposed regression methods. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset show our DetZero outperforms all state-of-the-art onboard and offboard 3D detection methods. Notably, DetZero ranks 1st place on Waymo 3D object detection leaderboard with 85.15 mAPH (L2) detection performance. Further experiments validate the application of taking the place of human labels with such high-quality results. Our empirical study leads to rethinking conventions and interesting findings that can guide future research on offboard 3D object detection.

StreetSurf: Extending Multi-view Implicit Surface Reconstruction to Street Views

We present a novel multi-view implicit surface reconstruction technique, termed StreetSurf, that is readily applicable to street view images in widely-used autonomous driving datasets, such as Waymo-perception sequences, without necessarily requiring LiDAR data. As neural rendering research expands rapidly, its integration into street views has started to draw interests. Existing approaches on street views either mainly focus on novel view synthesis with little exploration of the scene geometry, or rely heavily on dense LiDAR data when investigating reconstruction. Neither of them investigates multi-view implicit surface reconstruction, especially under settings without LiDAR data. Our method extends prior object-centric neural surface reconstruction techniques to address the unique challenges posed by the unbounded street views that are captured with non-object-centric, long and narrow camera trajectories. We delimit the unbounded space into three parts, close-range, distant-view and sky, with aligned cuboid boundaries, and adapt cuboid/hyper-cuboid hash-grids along with road-surface initialization scheme for finer and disentangled representation. To further address the geometric errors arising from textureless regions and insufficient viewing angles, we adopt geometric priors that are estimated using general purpose monocular models. Coupled with our implementation of efficient and fine-grained multi-stage ray marching strategy, we achieve state of the art reconstruction quality in both geometry and appearance within only one to two hours of training time with a single RTX3090 GPU for each street view sequence. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the reconstructed implicit surfaces have rich potential for various downstream tasks, including ray tracing and LiDAR simulation.

Calib-Anything: Zero-training LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration Method Using Segment Anything

The research on extrinsic calibration between Light Detection and Ranging(LiDAR) and camera are being promoted to a more accurate, automatic and generic manner. Since deep learning has been employed in calibration, the restrictions on the scene are greatly reduced. However, data driven method has the drawback of low transfer-ability. It cannot adapt to dataset variations unless additional training is taken. With the advent of foundation model, this problem can be significantly mitigated. By using the Segment Anything Model(SAM), we propose a novel LiDAR-camera calibration method, which requires zero extra training and adapts to common scenes. With an initial guess, we opimize the extrinsic parameter by maximizing the consistency of points that are projected inside each image mask. The consistency includes three properties of the point cloud: the intensity, normal vector and categories derived from some segmentation methods. The experiments on different dataset have demonstrated the generality and comparable accuracy of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenCalib/CalibAnything.

AD-PT: Autonomous Driving Pre-Training with Large-scale Point Cloud Dataset

It is a long-term vision for Autonomous Driving (AD) community that the perception models can learn from a large-scale point cloud dataset, to obtain unified representations that can achieve promising results on different tasks or benchmarks. Previous works mainly focus on the self-supervised pre-training pipeline, meaning that they perform the pre-training and fine-tuning on the same benchmark, which is difficult to attain the performance scalability and cross-dataset application for the pre-training checkpoint. In this paper, for the first time, we are committed to building a large-scale pre-training point-cloud dataset with diverse data distribution, and meanwhile learning generalizable representations from such a diverse pre-training dataset. We formulate the point-cloud pre-training task as a semi-supervised problem, which leverages the few-shot labeled and massive unlabeled point-cloud data to generate the unified backbone representations that can be directly applied to many baseline models and benchmarks, decoupling the AD-related pre-training process and downstream fine-tuning task. During the period of backbone pre-training, by enhancing the scene- and instance-level distribution diversity and exploiting the backbone's ability to learn from unknown instances, we achieve significant performance gains on a series of downstream perception benchmarks including Waymo, nuScenes, and KITTI, under different baseline models like PV-RCNN++, SECOND, CenterPoint.

Automatic Surround Camera Calibration Method in Road Scene for Self-driving Car

With the development of autonomous driving technology, sensor calibration has become a key technology to achieve accurate perception fusion and localization. Accurate calibration of the sensors ensures that each sensor can function properly and accurate information aggregation can be achieved. Among them, camera calibration based on surround view has received extensive attention. In autonomous driving applications, the calibration accuracy of the camera can directly affect the accuracy of perception and depth estimation. For online calibration of surround-view cameras, traditional feature extraction-based methods will suffer from strong distortion when the initial extrinsic parameters error is large, making these methods less robust and inaccurate. More existing methods use the sparse direct method to calibrate multi-cameras, which can ensure both accuracy and real-time performance and is theoretically achievable. However, this method requires a better initial value, and the initial estimate with a large error is often stuck in a local optimum. To this end, we introduce a robust automatic multi-cameras (pinhole or fisheye cameras) calibration and refinement method in the road scene. We utilize the coarse-to-fine random-search strategy, and it can solve large disturbances of initial extrinsic parameters, which can make up for falling into optimal local value in nonlinear optimization methods. In the end, quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted in actual and simulated environments, and the result shows the proposed method can achieve accuracy and robustness performance. The open-source code is available at https://github.com/OpenCalib/SurroundCameraCalib.

SUG: Single-dataset Unified Generalization for 3D Point Cloud Classification

Although Domain Generalization (DG) problem has been fast-growing in the 2D image tasks, its exploration on 3D point cloud data is still insufficient and challenged by more complex and uncertain cross-domain variances with uneven inter-class modality distribution. In this paper, different from previous 2D DG works, we focus on the 3D DG problem and propose a Single-dataset Unified Generalization (SUG) framework that only leverages a single source dataset to alleviate the unforeseen domain differences faced by a well-trained source model. Specifically, we first design a Multi-grained Sub-domain Alignment (MSA) method, which can constrain the learned representations to be domain-agnostic and discriminative, by performing a multi-grained feature alignment process between the splitted sub-domains from the single source dataset. Then, a Sample-level Domain-aware Attention (SDA) strategy is presented, which can selectively enhance easy-to-adapt samples from different sub-domains according to the sample-level inter-domain distance to avoid the negative transfer. Experiments demonstrate that our SUG can boost the generalization ability for unseen target domains, even outperforming the existing unsupervised domain adaptation methods that have to access extensive target domain data. Our code is available at https://github.com/SiyuanHuang95/SUG.