TFusionOcc: Student's t-Distribution Based Object-Centric Multi-Sensor Fusion Framework for 3D Occupancy Prediction

3D semantic occupancy prediction enables autonomous vehicles (AVs) to perceive fine-grained geometric and semantic structure of their surroundings from onboard sensors, which is essential for safe decision-making and navigation. Recent models for 3D semantic occupancy prediction have successfully addressed the challenge of describing real-world objects with varied shapes and classes. However, the intermediate representations used by existing methods for 3D semantic occupancy prediction rely heavily on 3D voxel volumes or a set of 3D Gaussians, hindering the model's ability to efficiently and effectively capture fine-grained geometric details in the 3D driving environment. This paper introduces TFusionOcc, a novel object-centric multi-sensor fusion framework for predicting 3D semantic occupancy. By leveraging multi-stage multi-sensor fusion, Student's t-distribution, and the T-Mixture model (TMM), together with more geometrically flexible primitives, such as the deformable superquadric (superquadric with inverse warp), the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the nuScenes benchmark. In addition, extensive experiments were conducted on the nuScenes-C dataset to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method in different camera and lidar corruption scenarios. The code will be available at: https://github.com/DanielMing123/TFusionOcc