Daily Papers

Recently, the pure camera-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perception provides a feasible solution for economical autonomous driving. However, the existing BEV-based multi-view 3D detectors generally transform all image features into BEV features, without considering the problem that the large proportion of background information may submerge the object information. In this paper, we propose Semantic-Aware BEV Pooling (SA-BEVPool), which can filter out background information according to the semantic segmentation of image features and transform image features into semantic-aware BEV features. Accordingly, we propose BEV-Paste, an effective data augmentation strategy that closely matches with semantic-aware BEV feature. In addition, we design a Multi-Scale Cross-Task (MSCT) head, which combines task-specific and cross-task information to predict depth distribution and semantic segmentation more accurately, further improving the quality of semantic-aware BEV feature. Finally, we integrate the above modules into a novel multi-view 3D object detection framework, namely SA-BEV. Experiments on nuScenes show that SA-BEV achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code has been available at https://github.com/mengtan00/SA-BEV.git.

Place recognition is a key module for long-term SLAM systems. Current LiDAR-based place recognition methods usually use representations of point clouds such as unordered points or range images. These methods achieve high recall rates of retrieval, but their performance may degrade in the case of view variation or scene changes. In this work, we explore the potential of a different representation in place recognition, i.e. bird's eye view (BEV) images. We observe that the structural contents of BEV images are less influenced by rotations and translations of point clouds. We validate that, without any delicate design, a simple VGGNet trained on BEV images achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art place recognition methods in scenes of slight viewpoint changes. For more robust place recognition, we design a rotation-invariant network called BEVPlace. We use group convolution to extract rotation-equivariant local features from the images and NetVLAD for global feature aggregation. In addition, we observe that the distance between BEV features is correlated with the geometry distance of point clouds. Based on the observation, we develop a method to estimate the position of the query cloud, extending the usage of place recognition. The experiments conducted on large-scale public datasets show that our method 1) achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of recall rates, 2) is robust to view changes, 3) shows strong generalization ability, and 4) can estimate the positions of query point clouds. Source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zjuluolun/BEVPlace.

Bird's eye view (BEV) representation is a new perception formulation for autonomous driving, which is based on spatial fusion. Further, temporal fusion is also introduced in BEV representation and gains great success. In this work, we propose a new method that unifies both spatial and temporal fusion and merges them into a unified mathematical formulation. The unified fusion could not only provide a new perspective on BEV fusion but also brings new capabilities. With the proposed unified spatial-temporal fusion, our method could support long-range fusion, which is hard to achieve in conventional BEV methods. Moreover, the BEV fusion in our work is temporal-adaptive and the weights of temporal fusion are learnable. In contrast, conventional methods mainly use fixed and equal weights for temporal fusion. Besides, the proposed unified fusion could avoid information lost in conventional BEV fusion methods and make full use of features. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the NuScenes dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed method and our method gains the state-of-the-art performance in the map segmentation task.

Autonomous vehicles (AV) require that neural networks used for perception be robust to different viewpoints if they are to be deployed across many types of vehicles without the repeated cost of data collection and labeling for each. AV companies typically focus on collecting data from diverse scenarios and locations, but not camera rig configurations, due to cost. As a result, only a small number of rig variations exist across most fleets. In this paper, we study how AV perception models are affected by changes in camera viewpoint and propose a way to scale them across vehicle types without repeated data collection and labeling. Using bird's eye view (BEV) segmentation as a motivating task, we find through extensive experiments that existing perception models are surprisingly sensitive to changes in camera viewpoint. When trained with data from one camera rig, small changes to pitch, yaw, depth, or height of the camera at inference time lead to large drops in performance. We introduce a technique for novel view synthesis and use it to transform collected data to the viewpoint of target rigs, allowing us to train BEV segmentation models for diverse target rigs without any additional data collection or labeling cost. To analyze the impact of viewpoint changes, we leverage synthetic data to mitigate other gaps (content, ISP, etc). Our approach is then trained on real data and evaluated on synthetic data, enabling evaluation on diverse target rigs. We release all data for use in future work. Our method is able to recover an average of 14.7% of the IoU that is otherwise lost when deploying to new rigs.

Accurately perceiving instances and predicting their future motion are key tasks for autonomous vehicles, enabling them to navigate safely in complex urban traffic. While bird's-eye view (BEV) representations are commonplace in perception for autonomous driving, their potential in a motion prediction setting is less explored. Existing approaches for BEV instance prediction from surround cameras rely on a multi-task auto-regressive setup coupled with complex post-processing to predict future instances in a spatio-temporally consistent manner. In this paper, we depart from this paradigm and propose an efficient novel end-to-end framework named POWERBEV, which differs in several design choices aimed at reducing the inherent redundancy in previous methods. First, rather than predicting the future in an auto-regressive fashion, POWERBEV uses a parallel, multi-scale module built from lightweight 2D convolutional networks. Second, we show that segmentation and centripetal backward flow are sufficient for prediction, simplifying previous multi-task objectives by eliminating redundant output modalities. Building on this output representation, we propose a simple, flow warping-based post-processing approach which produces more stable instance associations across time. Through this lightweight yet powerful design, POWERBEV outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on the NuScenes Dataset and poses an alternative paradigm for BEV instance prediction. We made our code publicly available at: https://github.com/EdwardLeeLPZ/PowerBEV.

Despite tremendous advancements in bird's-eye view (BEV) perception, existing models fall short in generating realistic and coherent semantic map layouts, and they fail to account for uncertainties arising from partial sensor information (such as occlusion or limited coverage). In this work, we introduce MapPrior, a novel BEV perception framework that combines a traditional discriminative BEV perception model with a learned generative model for semantic map layouts. Our MapPrior delivers predictions with better accuracy, realism, and uncertainty awareness. We evaluate our model on the large-scale nuScenes benchmark. At the time of submission, MapPrior outperforms the strongest competing method, with significantly improved MMD and ECE scores in camera- and LiDAR-based BEV perception.

Top-down Bird's Eye View (BEV) maps are a popular representation for ground robot navigation due to their richness and flexibility for downstream tasks. While recent methods have shown promise for predicting BEV maps from First-Person View (FPV) images, their generalizability is limited to small regions captured by current autonomous vehicle-based datasets. In this context, we show that a more scalable approach towards generalizable map prediction can be enabled by using two large-scale crowd-sourced mapping platforms, Mapillary for FPV images and OpenStreetMap for BEV semantic maps. We introduce Map It Anywhere (MIA), a data engine that enables seamless curation and modeling of labeled map prediction data from existing open-source map platforms. Using our MIA data engine, we display the ease of automatically collecting a dataset of 1.2 million pairs of FPV images & BEV maps encompassing diverse geographies, landscapes, environmental factors, camera models & capture scenarios. We further train a simple camera model-agnostic model on this data for BEV map prediction. Extensive evaluations using established benchmarks and our dataset show that the data curated by MIA enables effective pretraining for generalizable BEV map prediction, with zero-shot performance far exceeding baselines trained on existing datasets by 35%. Our analysis highlights the promise of using large-scale public maps for developing & testing generalizable BEV perception, paving the way for more robust autonomous navigation.

We present a novel bird's-eye-view (BEV) detector with perspective supervision, which converges faster and better suits modern image backbones. Existing state-of-the-art BEV detectors are often tied to certain depth pre-trained backbones like VoVNet, hindering the synergy between booming image backbones and BEV detectors. To address this limitation, we prioritize easing the optimization of BEV detectors by introducing perspective space supervision. To this end, we propose a two-stage BEV detector, where proposals from the perspective head are fed into the bird's-eye-view head for final predictions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive ablation studies focusing on the form of supervision and the generality of the proposed detector. The proposed method is verified with a wide spectrum of traditional and modern image backbones and achieves new SoTA results on the large-scale nuScenes dataset. The code shall be released soon.

Talk2BEV is a large vision-language model (LVLM) interface for bird's-eye view (BEV) maps in autonomous driving contexts. While existing perception systems for autonomous driving scenarios have largely focused on a pre-defined (closed) set of object categories and driving scenarios, Talk2BEV blends recent advances in general-purpose language and vision models with BEV-structured map representations, eliminating the need for task-specific models. This enables a single system to cater to a variety of autonomous driving tasks encompassing visual and spatial reasoning, predicting the intents of traffic actors, and decision-making based on visual cues. We extensively evaluate Talk2BEV on a large number of scene understanding tasks that rely on both the ability to interpret free-form natural language queries, and in grounding these queries to the visual context embedded into the language-enhanced BEV map. To enable further research in LVLMs for autonomous driving scenarios, we develop and release Talk2BEV-Bench, a benchmark encompassing 1000 human-annotated BEV scenarios, with more than 20,000 questions and ground-truth responses from the NuScenes dataset.

Accurate object detection and prediction are critical to ensure the safety and efficiency of self-driving architectures. Predicting object trajectories and occupancy enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate movements and make decisions with future information, increasing their adaptability and reducing the risk of accidents. Current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches often isolate the detection, tracking, and prediction stages, which can lead to significant prediction errors due to accumulated inaccuracies between stages. Recent advances have improved the feature representation of multi-camera perception systems through Bird's-Eye View (BEV) transformations, boosting the development of end-to-end systems capable of predicting environmental elements directly from vehicle sensor data. These systems, however, often suffer from high processing times and number of parameters, creating challenges for real-world deployment. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel BEV instance prediction architecture based on a simplified paradigm that relies only on instance segmentation and flow prediction. The proposed system prioritizes speed, aiming at reduced parameter counts and inference times compared to existing SOTA architectures, thanks to the incorporation of an efficient transformer-based architecture. Furthermore, the implementation of the proposed architecture is optimized for performance improvements in PyTorch version 2.1. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/miguelag99/Efficient-Instance-Prediction

In this paper, we introduce Mask2Map, a novel end-to-end online HD map construction method designed for autonomous driving applications. Our approach focuses on predicting the class and ordered point set of map instances within a scene, represented in the bird's eye view (BEV). Mask2Map consists of two primary components: the Instance-Level Mask Prediction Network (IMPNet) and the Mask-Driven Map Prediction Network (MMPNet). IMPNet generates Mask-Aware Queries and BEV Segmentation Masks to capture comprehensive semantic information globally. Subsequently, MMPNet enhances these query features using local contextual information through two submodules: the Positional Query Generator (PQG) and the Geometric Feature Extractor (GFE). PQG extracts instance-level positional queries by embedding BEV positional information into Mask-Aware Queries, while GFE utilizes BEV Segmentation Masks to generate point-level geometric features. However, we observed limited performance in Mask2Map due to inter-network inconsistency stemming from different predictions to Ground Truth (GT) matching between IMPNet and MMPNet. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Inter-network Denoising Training method, which guides the model to denoise the output affected by both noisy GT queries and perturbed GT Segmentation Masks. Our evaluation conducted on nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmarks demonstrates that Mask2Map achieves remarkable performance improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, with gains of 10.1% mAP and 4.1 mAP, respectively. Our code can be found at https://github.com/SehwanChoi0307/Mask2Map.

Multi-sensor fusion is essential for an accurate and reliable autonomous driving system. Recent approaches are based on point-level fusion: augmenting the LiDAR point cloud with camera features. However, the camera-to-LiDAR projection throws away the semantic density of camera features, hindering the effectiveness of such methods, especially for semantic-oriented tasks (such as 3D scene segmentation). In this paper, we break this deeply-rooted convention with BEVFusion, an efficient and generic multi-task multi-sensor fusion framework. It unifies multi-modal features in the shared bird's-eye view (BEV) representation space, which nicely preserves both geometric and semantic information. To achieve this, we diagnose and lift key efficiency bottlenecks in the view transformation with optimized BEV pooling, reducing latency by more than 40x. BEVFusion is fundamentally task-agnostic and seamlessly supports different 3D perception tasks with almost no architectural changes. It establishes the new state of the art on nuScenes, achieving 1.3% higher mAP and NDS on 3D object detection and 13.6% higher mIoU on BEV map segmentation, with 1.9x lower computation cost. Code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/bevfusion.

Recent vision-only perception models for autonomous driving achieved promising results by encoding multi-view image features into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space. A critical step and the main bottleneck of these methods is transforming image features into the BEV coordinate frame. This paper focuses on leveraging geometry information, such as depth, to model such feature transformation. Existing works rely on non-parametric depth distribution modeling leading to significant memory consumption, or ignore the geometry information to address this problem. In contrast, we propose to use parametric depth distribution modeling for feature transformation. We first lift the 2D image features to the 3D space defined for the ego vehicle via a predicted parametric depth distribution for each pixel in each view. Then, we aggregate the 3D feature volume based on the 3D space occupancy derived from depth to the BEV frame. Finally, we use the transformed features for downstream tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Existing semantic segmentation methods do also suffer from an hallucination problem as they do not take visibility information into account. This hallucination can be particularly problematic for subsequent modules such as control and planning. To mitigate the issue, our method provides depth uncertainty and reliable visibility-aware estimations. We further leverage our parametric depth modeling to present a novel visibility-aware evaluation metric that, when taken into account, can mitigate the hallucination problem. Extensive experiments on object detection and semantic segmentation on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods on both tasks.

Accurate obstacle identification represents a fundamental challenge within the scope of near-field perception for autonomous driving. Conventionally, fisheye cameras are frequently employed for comprehensive surround-view perception, including rear-view obstacle localization. However, the performance of such cameras can significantly deteriorate in low-light conditions, during nighttime, or when subjected to intense sun glare. Conversely, cost-effective sensors like ultrasonic sensors remain largely unaffected under these conditions. Therefore, we present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end multimodal fusion model tailored for efficient obstacle perception in a bird's-eye-view (BEV) perspective, utilizing fisheye cameras and ultrasonic sensors. Initially, ResNeXt-50 is employed as a set of unimodal encoders to extract features specific to each modality. Subsequently, the feature space associated with the visible spectrum undergoes transformation into BEV. The fusion of these two modalities is facilitated via concatenation. At the same time, the ultrasonic spectrum-based unimodal feature maps pass through content-aware dilated convolution, applied to mitigate the sensor misalignment between two sensors in the fused feature space. Finally, the fused features are utilized by a two-stage semantic occupancy decoder to generate grid-wise predictions for precise obstacle perception. We conduct a systematic investigation to determine the optimal strategy for multimodal fusion of both sensors. We provide insights into our dataset creation procedures, annotation guidelines, and perform a thorough data analysis to ensure adequate coverage of all scenarios. When applied to our dataset, the experimental results underscore the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed multimodal fusion approach.

In the field of 3D object detection for autonomous driving, the sensor portfolio including multi-modality and single-modality is diverse and complex. Since the multi-modal methods have system complexity while the accuracy of single-modal ones is relatively low, how to make a tradeoff between them is difficult. In this work, we propose a universal cross-modality knowledge distillation framework (UniDistill) to improve the performance of single-modality detectors. Specifically, during training, UniDistill projects the features of both the teacher and the student detector into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV), which is a friendly representation for different modalities. Then, three distillation losses are calculated to sparsely align the foreground features, helping the student learn from the teacher without introducing additional cost during inference. Taking advantage of the similar detection paradigm of different detectors in BEV, UniDistill easily supports LiDAR-to-camera, camera-to-LiDAR, fusion-to-LiDAR and fusion-to-camera distillation paths. Furthermore, the three distillation losses can filter the effect of misaligned background information and balance between objects of different sizes, improving the distillation effectiveness. Extensive experiments on nuScenes demonstrate that UniDistill effectively improves the mAP and NDS of student detectors by 2.0%~3.2%.

While bird's-eye-view (BEV) perception models can be useful for building high-definition maps (HD-Maps) with less human labor, their results are often unreliable and demonstrate noticeable inconsistencies in the predicted HD-Maps from different viewpoints. This is because BEV perception is typically set up in an 'onboard' manner, which restricts the computation and consequently prevents algorithms from reasoning multiple views simultaneously. This paper overcomes these limitations and advocates a more practical 'offboard' HD-Map generation setup that removes the computation constraints, based on the fact that HD-Maps are commonly reusable infrastructures built offline in data centers. To this end, we propose a novel offboard pipeline called MV-Map that capitalizes multi-view consistency and can handle an arbitrary number of frames with the key design of a 'region-centric' framework. In MV-Map, the target HD-Maps are created by aggregating all the frames of onboard predictions, weighted by the confidence scores assigned by an 'uncertainty network'. To further enhance multi-view consistency, we augment the uncertainty network with the global 3D structure optimized by a voxelized neural radiance field (Voxel-NeRF). Extensive experiments on nuScenes show that our MV-Map significantly improves the quality of HD-Maps, further highlighting the importance of offboard methods for HD-Map generation.

Aerial imagery analysis is critical for many research fields. However, obtaining frequent high-quality aerial images is not always accessible due to its high effort and cost requirements. One solution is to use the Ground-to-Aerial (G2A) technique to synthesize aerial images from easily collectible ground images. However, G2A is rarely studied, because of its challenges, including but not limited to, the drastic view changes, occlusion, and range of visibility. In this paper, we present a novel Geometric Preserving Ground-to-Aerial (G2A) image synthesis (GPG2A) model that can generate realistic aerial images from ground images. GPG2A consists of two stages. The first stage predicts the Bird's Eye View (BEV) segmentation (referred to as the BEV layout map) from the ground image. The second stage synthesizes the aerial image from the predicted BEV layout map and text descriptions of the ground image. To train our model, we present a new multi-modal cross-view dataset, namely VIGORv2 which is built upon VIGOR with newly collected aerial images, maps, and text descriptions. Our extensive experiments illustrate that GPG2A synthesizes better geometry-preserved aerial images than existing models. We also present two applications, data augmentation for cross-view geo-localization and sketch-based region search, to further verify the effectiveness of our GPG2A. The code and data will be publicly available.

Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly enhanced the data synthesis with 2D control. Yet, precise 3D control in street view generation, crucial for 3D perception tasks, remains elusive. Specifically, utilizing Bird's-Eye View (BEV) as the primary condition often leads to challenges in geometry control (e.g., height), affecting the representation of object shapes, occlusion patterns, and road surface elevations, all of which are essential to perception data synthesis, especially for 3D object detection tasks. In this paper, we introduce MagicDrive, a novel street view generation framework, offering diverse 3D geometry controls including camera poses, road maps, and 3D bounding boxes, together with textual descriptions, achieved through tailored encoding strategies. Besides, our design incorporates a cross-view attention module, ensuring consistency across multiple camera views. With MagicDrive, we achieve high-fidelity street-view image & video synthesis that captures nuanced 3D geometry and various scene descriptions, enhancing tasks like BEV segmentation and 3D object detection.

Modern methods for vision-centric autonomous driving perception widely adopt the bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation to describe a 3D scene. Despite its better efficiency than voxel representation, it has difficulty describing the fine-grained 3D structure of a scene with a single plane. To address this, we propose a tri-perspective view (TPV) representation which accompanies BEV with two additional perpendicular planes. We model each point in the 3D space by summing its projected features on the three planes. To lift image features to the 3D TPV space, we further propose a transformer-based TPV encoder (TPVFormer) to obtain the TPV features effectively. We employ the attention mechanism to aggregate the image features corresponding to each query in each TPV plane. Experiments show that our model trained with sparse supervision effectively predicts the semantic occupancy for all voxels. We demonstrate for the first time that using only camera inputs can achieve comparable performance with LiDAR-based methods on the LiDAR segmentation task on nuScenes. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/TPVFormer.

This paper proposes an efficient multi-camera to Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) view transformation method for 3D perception, dubbed MatrixVT. Existing view transformers either suffer from poor transformation efficiency or rely on device-specific operators, hindering the broad application of BEV models. In contrast, our method generates BEV features efficiently with only convolutions and matrix multiplications (MatMul). Specifically, we propose describing the BEV feature as the MatMul of image feature and a sparse Feature Transporting Matrix (FTM). A Prime Extraction module is then introduced to compress the dimension of image features and reduce FTM's sparsity. Moreover, we propose the Ring \& Ray Decomposition to replace the FTM with two matrices and reformulate our pipeline to reduce calculation further. Compared to existing methods, MatrixVT enjoys a faster speed and less memory footprint while remaining deploy-friendly. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that our method is highly efficient but obtains results on par with the SOTA method in object detection and map segmentation tasks

Recent implicit neural representations have shown great results for novel view synthesis. However, existing methods require expensive per-scene optimization from many views hence limiting their application to real-world unbounded urban settings where the objects of interest or backgrounds are observed from very few views. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce a new approach called NeO 360, Neural fields for sparse view synthesis of outdoor scenes. NeO 360 is a generalizable method that reconstructs 360{\deg} scenes from a single or a few posed RGB images. The essence of our approach is in capturing the distribution of complex real-world outdoor 3D scenes and using a hybrid image-conditional triplanar representation that can be queried from any world point. Our representation combines the best of both voxel-based and bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations and is more effective and expressive than each. NeO 360's representation allows us to learn from a large collection of unbounded 3D scenes while offering generalizability to new views and novel scenes from as few as a single image during inference. We demonstrate our approach on the proposed challenging 360{\deg} unbounded dataset, called NeRDS 360, and show that NeO 360 outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable methods for novel view synthesis while also offering editing and composition capabilities. Project page: https://zubair-irshad.github.io/projects/neo360.html

With the increasing popularity of autonomous driving based on the powerful and unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation, a demand for high-quality and large-scale multi-view video data with accurate annotation is urgently required. However, such large-scale multi-view data is hard to obtain due to expensive collection and annotation costs. To alleviate the problem, we propose a spatial-temporal consistent diffusion framework DrivingDiffusion, to generate realistic multi-view videos controlled by 3D layout. There are three challenges when synthesizing multi-view videos given a 3D layout: How to keep 1) cross-view consistency and 2) cross-frame consistency? 3) How to guarantee the quality of the generated instances? Our DrivingDiffusion solves the problem by cascading the multi-view single-frame image generation step, the single-view video generation step shared by multiple cameras, and post-processing that can handle long video generation. In the multi-view model, the consistency of multi-view images is ensured by information exchange between adjacent cameras. In the temporal model, we mainly query the information that needs attention in subsequent frame generation from the multi-view images of the first frame. We also introduce the local prompt to effectively improve the quality of generated instances. In post-processing, we further enhance the cross-view consistency of subsequent frames and extend the video length by employing temporal sliding window algorithm. Without any extra cost, our model can generate large-scale realistic multi-camera driving videos in complex urban scenes, fueling the downstream driving tasks. The code will be made publicly available.

Long-term temporal fusion is a crucial but often overlooked technique in camera-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D perception. Existing methods are mostly in a parallel manner. While parallel fusion can benefit from long-term information, it suffers from increasing computational and memory overheads as the fusion window size grows. Alternatively, BEVFormer adopts a recurrent fusion pipeline so that history information can be efficiently integrated, yet it fails to benefit from longer temporal frames. In this paper, we explore an embarrassingly simple long-term recurrent fusion strategy built upon the LSS-based methods and find it already able to enjoy the merits from both sides, i.e., rich long-term information and efficient fusion pipeline. A temporal embedding module is further proposed to improve the model's robustness against occasionally missed frames in practical scenarios. We name this simple but effective fusing pipeline VideoBEV. Experimental results on the nuScenes benchmark show that VideoBEV obtains leading performance on various camera-based 3D perception tasks, including object detection (55.4% mAP and 62.9% NDS), segmentation (48.6% vehicle mIoU), tracking (54.8% AMOTA), and motion prediction (0.80m minADE and 0.463 EPA). Code will be available.

Perception is crucial in the realm of autonomous driving systems, where bird's eye view (BEV)-based architectures have recently reached state-of-the-art performance. The desirability of self-supervised representation learning stems from the expensive and laborious process of annotating 2D and 3D data. Although previous research has investigated pretraining methods for both LiDAR and camera-based 3D object detection, a unified pretraining framework for multimodal BEV perception is missing. In this study, we introduce CALICO, a novel framework that applies contrastive objectives to both LiDAR and camera backbones. Specifically, CALICO incorporates two stages: point-region contrast (PRC) and region-aware distillation (RAD). PRC better balances the region- and scene-level representation learning on the LiDAR modality and offers significant performance improvement compared to existing methods. RAD effectively achieves contrastive distillation on our self-trained teacher model. CALICO's efficacy is substantiated by extensive evaluations on 3D object detection and BEV map segmentation tasks, where it delivers significant performance improvements. Notably, CALICO outperforms the baseline method by 10.5% and 8.6% on NDS and mAP. Moreover, CALICO boosts the robustness of multimodal 3D object detection against adversarial attacks and corruption. Additionally, our framework can be tailored to different backbones and heads, positioning it as a promising approach for multimodal BEV perception.

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm, named Historical Object Prediction (HoP) for multi-view 3D detection to leverage temporal information more effectively. The HoP approach is straightforward: given the current timestamp t, we generate a pseudo Bird's-Eye View (BEV) feature of timestamp t-k from its adjacent frames and utilize this feature to predict the object set at timestamp t-k. Our approach is motivated by the observation that enforcing the detector to capture both the spatial location and temporal motion of objects occurring at historical timestamps can lead to more accurate BEV feature learning. First, we elaborately design short-term and long-term temporal decoders, which can generate the pseudo BEV feature for timestamp t-k without the involvement of its corresponding camera images. Second, an additional object decoder is flexibly attached to predict the object targets using the generated pseudo BEV feature. Note that we only perform HoP during training, thus the proposed method does not introduce extra overheads during inference. As a plug-and-play approach, HoP can be easily incorporated into state-of-the-art BEV detection frameworks, including BEVFormer and BEVDet series. Furthermore, the auxiliary HoP approach is complementary to prevalent temporal modeling methods, leading to significant performance gains. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HoP on the nuScenes dataset. We choose the representative methods, including BEVFormer and BEVDet4D-Depth to evaluate our method. Surprisingly, HoP achieves 68.5% NDS and 62.4% mAP with ViT-L on nuScenes test, outperforming all the 3D object detectors on the leaderboard. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Sense-X/HoP.

We introduce RoScenes, the largest multi-view roadside perception dataset, which aims to shed light on the development of vision-centric Bird's Eye View (BEV) approaches for more challenging traffic scenes. The highlights of RoScenes include significantly large perception area, full scene coverage and crowded traffic. More specifically, our dataset achieves surprising 21.13M 3D annotations within 64,000 m^2. To relieve the expensive costs of roadside 3D labeling, we present a novel BEV-to-3D joint annotation pipeline to efficiently collect such a large volume of data. After that, we organize a comprehensive study for current BEV methods on RoScenes in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Tested methods suffer from the vast perception area and variation of sensor layout across scenes, resulting in performance levels falling below expectations. To this end, we propose RoBEV that incorporates feature-guided position embedding for effective 2D-3D feature assignment. With its help, our method outperforms state-of-the-art by a large margin without extra computational overhead on validation set. Our dataset and devkit will be made available at https://github.com/xiaosu-zhu/RoScenes.

Understanding road geometry is a critical component of the autonomous vehicle (AV) stack. While high-definition (HD) maps can readily provide such information, they suffer from high labeling and maintenance costs. Accordingly, many recent works have proposed methods for estimating HD maps online from sensor data. The vast majority of recent approaches encode multi-camera observations into an intermediate representation, e.g., a bird's eye view (BEV) grid, and produce vector map elements via a decoder. While this architecture is performant, it decimates much of the information encoded in the intermediate representation, preventing downstream tasks (e.g., behavior prediction) from leveraging them. In this work, we propose exposing the rich internal features of online map estimation methods and show how they enable more tightly integrating online mapping with trajectory forecasting. In doing so, we find that directly accessing internal BEV features yields up to 73% faster inference speeds and up to 29% more accurate predictions on the real-world nuScenes dataset.

Building 3D perception systems for autonomous vehicles that do not rely on high-density LiDAR is a critical research problem because of the expense of LiDAR systems compared to cameras and other sensors. Recent research has developed a variety of camera-only methods, where features are differentiably "lifted" from the multi-camera images onto the 2D ground plane, yielding a "bird's eye view" (BEV) feature representation of the 3D space around the vehicle. This line of work has produced a variety of novel "lifting" methods, but we observe that other details in the training setups have shifted at the same time, making it unclear what really matters in top-performing methods. We also observe that using cameras alone is not a real-world constraint, considering that additional sensors like radar have been integrated into real vehicles for years already. In this paper, we first of all attempt to elucidate the high-impact factors in the design and training protocol of BEV perception models. We find that batch size and input resolution greatly affect performance, while lifting strategies have a more modest effect -- even a simple parameter-free lifter works well. Second, we demonstrate that radar data can provide a substantial boost to performance, helping to close the gap between camera-only and LiDAR-enabled systems. We analyze the radar usage details that lead to good performance, and invite the community to re-consider this commonly-neglected part of the sensor platform.

Bird's-eye view (BEV) perception for autonomous driving has garnered significant attention in recent years, in part because BEV representation facilitates the fusion of multi-sensor data. This enables a variety of perception tasks including BEV segmentation, a concise view of the environment that can be used to plan a vehicle's trajectory. However, this representation is not fully supported by existing datasets, and creation of new datasets can be a time-consuming endeavor. To address this problem, in this paper we introduce SimBEV, an extensively configurable and scalable randomized synthetic data generation tool that incorporates information from multiple sources to capture accurate BEV ground truth data, supports a comprehensive array of sensors, and enables a variety of perception tasks including BEV segmentation and 3D object detection. We use SimBEV to create the SimBEV dataset, a large collection of annotated perception data from diverse driving scenarios.

The choice of representation plays a key role in self-driving. Bird's eye view (BEV) representations have shown remarkable performance in recent years. In this paper, we propose to learn object-centric representations in BEV to distill a complex scene into more actionable information for self-driving. We first learn to place objects into slots with a slot attention model on BEV sequences. Based on these object-centric representations, we then train a transformer to learn to drive as well as reason about the future of other vehicles. We found that object-centric slot representations outperform both scene-level and object-level approaches that use the exact attributes of objects. Slot representations naturally incorporate information about objects from their spatial and temporal context such as position, heading, and speed without explicitly providing it. Our model with slots achieves an increased completion rate of the provided routes and, consequently, a higher driving score, with a lower variance across multiple runs, affirming slots as a reliable alternative in object-centric approaches. Additionally, we validate our model's performance as a world model through forecasting experiments, demonstrating its capability to predict future slot representations accurately. The code and the pre-trained models can be found at https://kuis-ai.github.io/CarFormer/.

The future instance prediction from a Bird's Eye View(BEV) perspective is a vital component in autonomous driving, which involves future instance segmentation and instance motion prediction. Existing methods usually rely on a redundant and complex pipeline which requires multiple auxiliary outputs and post-processing procedures. Moreover, estimated errors on each of the auxiliary predictions will lead to degradation of the prediction performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective fully end-to-end framework named Future Instance Prediction Transformer(FipTR), which views the task as BEV instance segmentation and prediction for future frames. We propose to adopt instance queries representing specific traffic participants to directly estimate the corresponding future occupied masks, and thus get rid of complex post-processing procedures. Besides, we devise a flow-aware BEV predictor for future BEV feature prediction composed of a flow-aware deformable attention that takes backward flow guiding the offset sampling. A novel future instance matching strategy is also proposed to further improve the temporal coherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FipTR and its effectiveness under different temporal BEV encoders. The code is available at https://github.com/TabGuigui/FipTR .

In this work, we present SceneDreamer, an unconditional generative model for unbounded 3D scenes, which synthesizes large-scale 3D landscapes from random noise. Our framework is learned from in-the-wild 2D image collections only, without any 3D annotations. At the core of SceneDreamer is a principled learning paradigm comprising 1) an efficient yet expressive 3D scene representation, 2) a generative scene parameterization, and 3) an effective renderer that can leverage the knowledge from 2D images. Our approach begins with an efficient bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation generated from simplex noise, which includes a height field for surface elevation and a semantic field for detailed scene semantics. This BEV scene representation enables 1) representing a 3D scene with quadratic complexity, 2) disentangled geometry and semantics, and 3) efficient training. Moreover, we propose a novel generative neural hash grid to parameterize the latent space based on 3D positions and scene semantics, aiming to encode generalizable features across various scenes. Lastly, a neural volumetric renderer, learned from 2D image collections through adversarial training, is employed to produce photorealistic images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SceneDreamer and superiority over state-of-the-art methods in generating vivid yet diverse unbounded 3D worlds.

Driving World Models (DWMs) have become essential for autonomous driving by enabling future scene prediction. However, existing DWMs are limited to scene generation and fail to incorporate scene understanding, which involves interpreting and reasoning about the driving environment. In this paper, we present a unified Driving World Model named HERMES. We seamlessly integrate 3D scene understanding and future scene evolution (generation) through a unified framework in driving scenarios. Specifically, HERMES leverages a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation to consolidate multi-view spatial information while preserving geometric relationships and interactions. We also introduce world queries, which incorporate world knowledge into BEV features via causal attention in the Large Language Model (LLM), enabling contextual enrichment for understanding and generation tasks. We conduct comprehensive studies on nuScenes and OmniDrive-nuScenes datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method. HERMES achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing generation error by 32.4% and improving understanding metrics such as CIDEr by 8.0%. The model and code will be publicly released at https://github.com/LMD0311/HERMES.

Efficient reasoning about the semantic, spatial, and temporal structure of a scene is a crucial prerequisite for autonomous driving. We present NEural ATtention fields (NEAT), a novel representation that enables such reasoning for end-to-end imitation learning models. NEAT is a continuous function which maps locations in Bird's Eye View (BEV) scene coordinates to waypoints and semantics, using intermediate attention maps to iteratively compress high-dimensional 2D image features into a compact representation. This allows our model to selectively attend to relevant regions in the input while ignoring information irrelevant to the driving task, effectively associating the images with the BEV representation. In a new evaluation setting involving adverse environmental conditions and challenging scenarios, NEAT outperforms several strong baselines and achieves driving scores on par with the privileged CARLA expert used to generate its training data. Furthermore, visualizing the attention maps for models with NEAT intermediate representations provides improved interpretability.

In recent years, 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have made significant strides in image-text understanding tasks. However, their performance in 3D spatial comprehension, which is critical for embodied intelligence, remains limited. Recent advances have leveraged 3D point clouds and multi-view images as inputs, yielding promising results. However, we propose exploring a purely vision-based solution inspired by human perception, which merely relies on visual cues for 3D spatial understanding. This paper empirically investigates the limitations of VLMs in 3D spatial knowledge, revealing that their primary shortcoming lies in the lack of global-local correspondence between the scene and individual frames. To address this, we introduce GPT4Scene, a novel visual prompting paradigm in VLM training and inference that helps build the global-local relationship, significantly improving the 3D spatial understanding of indoor scenes. Specifically, GPT4Scene constructs a 3D Bird's Eye View (BEV) image from the video and marks consistent object IDs across both frames and the BEV image. The model then inputs the concatenated BEV image and video frames with markers. In zero-shot evaluations, GPT4Scene improves performance over closed-source VLMs like GPT-4o. Additionally, we prepare a processed video dataset consisting of 165K text annotation to fine-tune open-source VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on all 3D understanding tasks. Surprisingly, after training with the GPT4Scene paradigm, VLMs consistently improve during inference, even without visual prompting and BEV image as explicit correspondence. It demonstrates that the proposed paradigm helps VLMs develop an intrinsic ability to understand 3D scenes, which paves the way for a noninvasive approach to extending pre-trained VLMs for 3D scene understanding.

Recent camera-based 3D object detection methods have introduced sequential frames to improve the detection performance hoping that multiple frames would mitigate the large depth estimation error. Despite improved detection performance, prior works rely on naive fusion methods (e.g., concatenation) or are limited to static scenes (e.g., temporal stereo), neglecting the importance of the motion cue of objects. These approaches do not fully exploit the potential of sequential images and show limited performance improvements. To address this limitation, we propose a novel 3D object detection model, P2D (Predict to Detect), that integrates a prediction scheme into a detection framework to explicitly extract and leverage motion features. P2D predicts object information in the current frame using solely past frames to learn temporal motion features. We then introduce a novel temporal feature aggregation method that attentively exploits Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features based on predicted object information, resulting in accurate 3D object detection. Experimental results demonstrate that P2D improves mAP and NDS by 3.0% and 3.7% compared to the sequential image-based baseline, illustrating that incorporating a prediction scheme can significantly improve detection accuracy.

Vehicle motion planning is an essential component of autonomous driving technology. Current rule-based vehicle motion planning methods perform satisfactorily in common scenarios but struggle to generalize to long-tailed situations. Meanwhile, learning-based methods have yet to achieve superior performance over rule-based approaches in large-scale closed-loop scenarios. To address these issues, we propose PlanAgent, the first mid-to-mid planning system based on a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM). MLLM is used as a cognitive agent to introduce human-like knowledge, interpretability, and common-sense reasoning into the closed-loop planning. Specifically, PlanAgent leverages the power of MLLM through three core modules. First, an Environment Transformation module constructs a Bird's Eye View (BEV) map and a lane-graph-based textual description from the environment as inputs. Second, a Reasoning Engine module introduces a hierarchical chain-of-thought from scene understanding to lateral and longitudinal motion instructions, culminating in planner code generation. Last, a Reflection module is integrated to simulate and evaluate the generated planner for reducing MLLM's uncertainty. PlanAgent is endowed with the common-sense reasoning and generalization capability of MLLM, which empowers it to effectively tackle both common and complex long-tailed scenarios. Our proposed PlanAgent is evaluated on the large-scale and challenging nuPlan benchmarks. A comprehensive set of experiments convincingly demonstrates that PlanAgent outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in the closed-loop motion planning task. Codes will be soon released.

The field of autonomous driving has attracted considerable interest in approaches that directly infer 3D objects in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) from multiple cameras. Some attempts have also explored utilizing 2D detectors from single images to enhance the performance of 3D detection. However, these approaches rely on a two-stage process with separate detectors, where the 2D detection results are utilized only once for token selection or query initialization. In this paper, we present a single model termed SimPB, which simultaneously detects 2D objects in the perspective view and 3D objects in the BEV space from multiple cameras. To achieve this, we introduce a hybrid decoder consisting of several multi-view 2D decoder layers and several 3D decoder layers, specifically designed for their respective detection tasks. A Dynamic Query Allocation module and an Adaptive Query Aggregation module are proposed to continuously update and refine the interaction between 2D and 3D results, in a cyclic 3D-2D-3D manner. Additionally, Query-group Attention is utilized to strengthen the interaction among 2D queries within each camera group. In the experiments, we evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset and demonstrate promising results for both 2D and 3D detection tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/nullmax-vision/SimPB.

This paper presents a vector HD-mapping algorithm that formulates the mapping as a tracking task and uses a history of memory latents to ensure consistent reconstructions over time. Our method, MapTracker, accumulates a sensor stream into memory buffers of two latent representations: 1) Raster latents in the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space and 2) Vector latents over the road elements (i.e., pedestrian-crossings, lane-dividers, and road-boundaries). The approach borrows the query propagation paradigm from the tracking literature that explicitly associates tracked road elements from the previous frame to the current, while fusing a subset of memory latents selected with distance strides to further enhance temporal consistency. A vector latent is decoded to reconstruct the geometry of a road element. The paper further makes benchmark contributions by 1) Improving processing code for existing datasets to produce consistent ground truth with temporal alignments and 2) Augmenting existing mAP metrics with consistency checks. MapTracker significantly outperforms existing methods on both nuScenes and Agroverse2 datasets by over 8% and 19% on the conventional and the new consistency-aware metrics, respectively. The code will be available on our project page: https://map-tracker.github.io.

Autonomous driving requires an accurate and fast 3D perception system that includes 3D object detection, tracking, and segmentation. Although recent low-cost camera-based approaches have shown promising results, they are susceptible to poor illumination or bad weather conditions and have a large localization error. Hence, fusing camera with low-cost radar, which provides precise long-range measurement and operates reliably in all environments, is promising but has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we propose Camera Radar Net (CRN), a novel camera-radar fusion framework that generates a semantically rich and spatially accurate bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map for various tasks. To overcome the lack of spatial information in an image, we transform perspective view image features to BEV with the help of sparse but accurate radar points. We further aggregate image and radar feature maps in BEV using multi-modal deformable attention designed to tackle the spatial misalignment between inputs. CRN with real-time setting operates at 20 FPS while achieving comparable performance to LiDAR detectors on nuScenes, and even outperforms at a far distance on 100m setting. Moreover, CRN with offline setting yields 62.4% NDS, 57.5% mAP on nuScenes test set and ranks first among all camera and camera-radar 3D object detectors.

Autonomous driving for urban and highway driving applications often requires High Definition (HD) maps to generate a navigation plan. Nevertheless, various challenges arise when generating and maintaining HD maps at scale. While recent online mapping methods have started to emerge, their performance especially for longer ranges is limited by heavy occlusion in dynamic environments. With these considerations in mind, our work focuses on leveraging lightweight and scalable priors-Standard Definition (SD) maps-in the development of online vectorized HD map representations. We first examine the integration of prototypical rasterized SD map representations into various online mapping architectures. Furthermore, to identify lightweight strategies, we extend the OpenLane-V2 dataset with OpenStreetMaps and evaluate the benefits of graphical SD map representations. A key finding from designing SD map integration components is that SD map encoders are model agnostic and can be quickly adapted to new architectures that utilize bird's eye view (BEV) encoders. Our results show that making use of SD maps as priors for the online mapping task can significantly speed up convergence and boost the performance of the online centerline perception task by 30% (mAP). Furthermore, we show that the introduction of the SD maps leads to a reduction of the number of parameters in the perception and reasoning task by leveraging SD map graphs while improving the overall performance. Project Page: https://henryzhangzhy.github.io/sdhdmap/.

Video amodal segmentation is a particularly challenging task in computer vision, which requires to deduce the full shape of an object from the visible parts of it. Recently, some studies have achieved promising performance by using motion flow to integrate information across frames under a self-supervised setting. However, motion flow has a clear limitation by the two factors of moving cameras and object deformation. This paper presents a rethinking to previous works. We particularly leverage the supervised signals with object-centric representation in real-world scenarios. The underlying idea is the supervision signal of the specific object and the features from different views can mutually benefit the deduction of the full mask in any specific frame. We thus propose an Efficient object-centric Representation amodal Segmentation (EoRaS). Specially, beyond solely relying on supervision signals, we design a translation module to project image features into the Bird's-Eye View (BEV), which introduces 3D information to improve current feature quality. Furthermore, we propose a multi-view fusion layer based temporal module which is equipped with a set of object slots and interacts with features from different views by attention mechanism to fulfill sufficient object representation completion. As a result, the full mask of the object can be decoded from image features updated by object slots. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be released at https://github.com/kfan21/EoRaS.

Cross-modal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to exploit the complementarity of 2D-3D data to overcome the lack of annotation in a new domain. However, UDA methods rely on access to the target domain during training, meaning the trained model only works in a specific target domain. In light of this, we propose cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view for Domain Generalization (DG) of 3D semantic segmentation, called BEV-DG. DG is more challenging because the model cannot access the target domain during training, meaning it needs to rely on cross-modal learning to alleviate the domain gap. Since 3D semantic segmentation requires the classification of each point, existing cross-modal learning is directly conducted point-to-point, which is sensitive to the misalignment in projections between pixels and points. To this end, our approach aims to optimize domain-irrelevant representation modeling with the aid of cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view. We propose BEV-based Area-to-area Fusion (BAF) to conduct cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view, which has a higher fault tolerance for point-level misalignment. Furthermore, to model domain-irrelevant representations, we propose BEV-driven Domain Contrastive Learning (BDCL) with the help of cross-modal learning under bird's-eye view. We design three domain generalization settings based on three 3D datasets, and BEV-DG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competitors with tremendous margins in all settings.

Vision-language navigation (VLN), which entails an agent to navigate 3D environments following human instructions, has shown great advances. However, current agents are built upon panoramic observations, which hinders their ability to perceive 3D scene geometry and easily leads to ambiguous selection of panoramic view. To address these limitations, we present a BEV Scene Graph (BSG), which leverages multi-step BEV representations to encode scene layouts and geometric cues of indoor environment under the supervision of 3D detection. During navigation, BSG builds a local BEV representation at each step and maintains a BEV-based global scene map, which stores and organizes all the online collected local BEV representations according to their topological relations. Based on BSG, the agent predicts a local BEV grid-level decision score and a global graph-level decision score, combined with a sub-view selection score on panoramic views, for more accurate action prediction. Our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on REVERIE, R2R, and R4R, showing the potential of BEV perception in VLN.

Jointly processing information from multiple sensors is crucial to achieving accurate and robust perception for reliable autonomous driving systems. However, current 3D perception research follows a modality-specific paradigm, leading to additional computation overheads and inefficient collaboration between different sensor data. In this paper, we present an efficient multi-modal backbone for outdoor 3D perception named UniTR, which processes a variety of modalities with unified modeling and shared parameters. Unlike previous works, UniTR introduces a modality-agnostic transformer encoder to handle these view-discrepant sensor data for parallel modal-wise representation learning and automatic cross-modal interaction without additional fusion steps. More importantly, to make full use of these complementary sensor types, we present a novel multi-modal integration strategy by both considering semantic-abundant 2D perspective and geometry-aware 3D sparse neighborhood relations. UniTR is also a fundamentally task-agnostic backbone that naturally supports different 3D perception tasks. It sets a new state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark, achieving +1.1 NDS higher for 3D object detection and +12.0 higher mIoU for BEV map segmentation with lower inference latency. Code will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/UniTR .

Current research in semantic bird's-eye view segmentation for autonomous driving focuses solely on optimizing neural network models using a single dataset, typically nuScenes. This practice leads to the development of highly specialized models that may fail when faced with different environments or sensor setups, a problem known as domain shift. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive cross-dataset evaluation of state-of-the-art BEV segmentation models to assess their performance across different training and testing datasets and setups, as well as different semantic categories. We investigate the influence of different sensors, such as cameras and LiDAR, on the models' ability to generalize to diverse conditions and scenarios. Additionally, we conduct multi-dataset training experiments that improve models' BEV segmentation performance compared to single-dataset training. Our work addresses the gap in evaluating BEV segmentation models under cross-dataset validation. And our findings underscore the importance of enhancing model generalizability and adaptability to ensure more robust and reliable BEV segmentation approaches for autonomous driving applications. The code for this paper available at https://github.com/manueldiaz96/beval .

LiDAR-based 3D detection has made great progress in recent years. However, the performance of 3D detectors is considerably limited when deployed in unseen environments, owing to the severe domain gap problem. Existing domain adaptive 3D detection methods do not adequately consider the problem of the distributional discrepancy in feature space, thereby hindering generalization of detectors across domains. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptive 3D detection framework, namely Geometry-aware Prototype Alignment (GPA-3D), which explicitly leverages the intrinsic geometric relationship from point cloud objects to reduce the feature discrepancy, thus facilitating cross-domain transferring. Specifically, GPA-3D assigns a series of tailored and learnable prototypes to point cloud objects with distinct geometric structures. Each prototype aligns BEV (bird's-eye-view) features derived from corresponding point cloud objects on source and target domains, reducing the distributional discrepancy and achieving better adaptation. The evaluation results obtained on various benchmarks, including Waymo, nuScenes and KITTI, demonstrate the superiority of our GPA-3D over the state-of-the-art approaches for different adaptation scenarios. The MindSpore version code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Liz66666/GPA3D.

Camera-based 3D object detection in BEV (Bird's Eye View) space has drawn great attention over the past few years. Dense detectors typically follow a two-stage pipeline by first constructing a dense BEV feature and then performing object detection in BEV space, which suffers from complex view transformations and high computation cost. On the other side, sparse detectors follow a query-based paradigm without explicit dense BEV feature construction, but achieve worse performance than the dense counterparts. In this paper, we find that the key to mitigate this performance gap is the adaptability of the detector in both BEV and image space. To achieve this goal, we propose SparseBEV, a fully sparse 3D object detector that outperforms the dense counterparts. SparseBEV contains three key designs, which are (1) scale-adaptive self attention to aggregate features with adaptive receptive field in BEV space, (2) adaptive spatio-temporal sampling to generate sampling locations under the guidance of queries, and (3) adaptive mixing to decode the sampled features with dynamic weights from the queries. On the test split of nuScenes, SparseBEV achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 67.5 NDS. On the val split, SparseBEV achieves 55.8 NDS while maintaining a real-time inference speed of 23.5 FPS. Code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/SparseBEV.

Given an image with multiple people, our goal is to directly regress the pose and shape of all the people as well as their relative depth. Inferring the depth of a person in an image, however, is fundamentally ambiguous without knowing their height. This is particularly problematic when the scene contains people of very different sizes, e.g. from infants to adults. To solve this, we need several things. First, we develop a novel method to infer the poses and depth of multiple people in a single image. While previous work that estimates multiple people does so by reasoning in the image plane, our method, called BEV, adds an additional imaginary Bird's-Eye-View representation to explicitly reason about depth. BEV reasons simultaneously about body centers in the image and in depth and, by combing these, estimates 3D body position. Unlike prior work, BEV is a single-shot method that is end-to-end differentiable. Second, height varies with age, making it impossible to resolve depth without also estimating the age of people in the image. To do so, we exploit a 3D body model space that lets BEV infer shapes from infants to adults. Third, to train BEV, we need a new dataset. Specifically, we create a "Relative Human" (RH) dataset that includes age labels and relative depth relationships between the people in the images. Extensive experiments on RH and AGORA demonstrate the effectiveness of the model and training scheme. BEV outperforms existing methods on depth reasoning, child shape estimation, and robustness to occlusion. The code and dataset are released for research purposes.

Autonomous driving requires efficient reasoning about the location and appearance of the different agents in the scene, which aids in downstream tasks such as object detection, object tracking, and path planning. The past few years have witnessed a surge in approaches that combine the different taskbased modules of the classic self-driving stack into an End-toEnd(E2E) trainable learning system. These approaches replace perception, prediction, and sensor fusion modules with a single contiguous module with shared latent space embedding, from which one extracts a human-interpretable representation of the scene. One of the most popular representations is the Birds-eye View (BEV), which expresses the location of different traffic participants in the ego vehicle frame from a top-down view. However, a BEV does not capture the chromatic appearance information of the participants. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel representation that captures various traffic participants appearance and occupancy information from an array of monocular cameras covering 360 deg field of view (FOV). We use a learned image embedding of all camera images to generate a BEV of the scene at any instant that captures both appearance and occupancy of the scene, which can aid in downstream tasks such as object tracking and executing language-based commands. We test the efficacy of our approach on synthetic dataset generated from CARLA. The code, data set, and results can be found at https://rebrand.ly/APP OCC-results.

In this paper, we present BEVerse, a unified framework for 3D perception and prediction based on multi-camera systems. Unlike existing studies focusing on the improvement of single-task approaches, BEVerse features in producing spatio-temporal Birds-Eye-View (BEV) representations from multi-camera videos and jointly reasoning about multiple tasks for vision-centric autonomous driving. Specifically, BEVerse first performs shared feature extraction and lifting to generate 4D BEV representations from multi-timestamp and multi-view images. After the ego-motion alignment, the spatio-temporal encoder is utilized for further feature extraction in BEV. Finally, multiple task decoders are attached for joint reasoning and prediction. Within the decoders, we propose the grid sampler to generate BEV features with different ranges and granularities for different tasks. Also, we design the method of iterative flow for memory-efficient future prediction. We show that the temporal information improves 3D object detection and semantic map construction, while the multi-task learning can implicitly benefit motion prediction. With extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset, we show that the multi-task BEVerse outperforms existing single-task methods on 3D object detection, semantic map construction, and motion prediction. Compared with the sequential paradigm, BEVerse also favors in significantly improved efficiency. The code and trained models will be released at https://github.com/zhangyp15/BEVerse.

View Transformation Module (VTM), where transformations happen between multi-view image features and Bird-Eye-View (BEV) representation, is a crucial step in camera-based BEV perception systems. Currently, the two most prominent VTM paradigms are forward projection and backward projection. Forward projection, represented by Lift-Splat-Shoot, leads to sparsely projected BEV features without post-processing. Backward projection, with BEVFormer being an example, tends to generate false-positive BEV features from incorrect projections due to the lack of utilization on depth. To address the above limitations, we propose a novel forward-backward view transformation module. Our approach compensates for the deficiencies in both existing methods, allowing them to enhance each other to obtain higher quality BEV representations mutually. We instantiate the proposed module with FB-BEV, which achieves a new state-of-the-art result of 62.4% NDS on the nuScenes test set. Code and models are available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FB-BEV.

Multi-view 3D detection based on BEV (bird-eye-view) has recently achieved significant improvements. However, the huge memory consumption of state-of-the-art models makes it hard to deploy them on vehicles, and the non-trivial latency will affect the real-time perception of streaming applications. Despite the wide application of quantization to lighten models, we show in our paper that directly applying quantization in BEV tasks will 1) make the training unstable, and 2) lead to intolerable performance degradation. To solve these issues, our method QD-BEV enables a novel view-guided distillation (VGD) objective, which can stabilize the quantization-aware training (QAT) while enhancing the model performance by leveraging both image features and BEV features. Our experiments show that QD-BEV achieves similar or even better accuracy than previous methods with significant efficiency gains. On the nuScenes datasets, the 4-bit weight and 6-bit activation quantized QD-BEV-Tiny model achieves 37.2% NDS with only 15.8 MB model size, outperforming BevFormer-Tiny by 1.8% with an 8x model compression. On the Small and Base variants, QD-BEV models also perform superbly and achieve 47.9% NDS (28.2 MB) and 50.9% NDS (32.9 MB), respectively.

The transformation of features from 2D perspective space to 3D space is essential to multi-view 3D object detection. Recent approaches mainly focus on the design of view transformation, either pixel-wisely lifting perspective view features into 3D space with estimated depth or grid-wisely constructing BEV features via 3D projection, treating all pixels or grids equally. However, choosing what to transform is also important but has rarely been discussed before. The pixels of a moving car are more informative than the pixels of the sky. To fully utilize the information contained in images, the view transformation should be able to adapt to different image regions according to their contents. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named FrustumFormer, which pays more attention to the features in instance regions via adaptive instance-aware resampling. Specifically, the model obtains instance frustums on the bird's eye view by leveraging image view object proposals. An adaptive occupancy mask within the instance frustum is learned to refine the instance location. Moreover, the temporal frustum intersection could further reduce the localization uncertainty of objects. Comprehensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of FrustumFormer, and we achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark. Codes and models will be made available at https://github.com/Robertwyq/Frustum.

Understanding the motion states of the surrounding environment is critical for safe autonomous driving. These motion states can be accurately derived from scene flow, which captures the three-dimensional motion field of points. Existing LiDAR scene flow methods extract spatial features from each point cloud and then fuse them channel-wise, resulting in the implicit extraction of spatio-temporal features. Furthermore, they utilize 2D Bird's Eye View and process only two frames, missing crucial spatial information along the Z-axis and the broader temporal context, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these limitations, we propose Flow4D, which temporally fuses multiple point clouds after the 3D intra-voxel feature encoder, enabling more explicit extraction of spatio-temporal features through a 4D voxel network. However, while using 4D convolution improves performance, it significantly increases the computational load. For further efficiency, we introduce the Spatio-Temporal Decomposition Block (STDB), which combines 3D and 1D convolutions instead of using heavy 4D convolution. In addition, Flow4D further improves performance by using five frames to take advantage of richer temporal information. As a result, the proposed method achieves a 45.9% higher performance compared to the state-of-the-art while running in real-time, and won 1st place in the 2024 Argoverse 2 Scene Flow Challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/dgist-cvlab/Flow4D.

How should we integrate representations from complementary sensors for autonomous driving? Geometry-based fusion has shown promise for perception (e.g. object detection, motion forecasting). However, in the context of end-to-end driving, we find that imitation learning based on existing sensor fusion methods underperforms in complex driving scenarios with a high density of dynamic agents. Therefore, we propose TransFuser, a mechanism to integrate image and LiDAR representations using self-attention. Our approach uses transformer modules at multiple resolutions to fuse perspective view and bird's eye view feature maps. We experimentally validate its efficacy on a challenging new benchmark with long routes and dense traffic, as well as the official leaderboard of the CARLA urban driving simulator. At the time of submission, TransFuser outperforms all prior work on the CARLA leaderboard in terms of driving score by a large margin. Compared to geometry-based fusion, TransFuser reduces the average collisions per kilometer by 48%.

Humans can orient themselves in their 3D environments using simple 2D maps. Differently, algorithms for visual localization mostly rely on complex 3D point clouds that are expensive to build, store, and maintain over time. We bridge this gap by introducing OrienterNet, the first deep neural network that can localize an image with sub-meter accuracy using the same 2D semantic maps that humans use. OrienterNet estimates the location and orientation of a query image by matching a neural Bird's-Eye View with open and globally available maps from OpenStreetMap, enabling anyone to localize anywhere such maps are available. OrienterNet is supervised only by camera poses but learns to perform semantic matching with a wide range of map elements in an end-to-end manner. To enable this, we introduce a large crowd-sourced dataset of images captured across 12 cities from the diverse viewpoints of cars, bikes, and pedestrians. OrienterNet generalizes to new datasets and pushes the state of the art in both robotics and AR scenarios. The code and trained model will be released publicly.

Autonomous driving in high-speed racing, as opposed to urban environments, presents significant challenges in scene understanding due to rapid changes in the track environment. Traditional sequential network approaches may struggle to meet the real-time knowledge and decision-making demands of an autonomous agent covering large displacements in a short time. This paper proposes a novel baseline architecture for developing sophisticated models capable of true hardware-enabled parallelism, achieving neural processing speeds that mirror the agent's high velocity. The proposed model (Parallel Perception Network (PPN)) consists of two independent neural networks, segmentation and reconstruction networks, running parallelly on separate accelerated hardware. The model takes raw 3D point cloud data from the LiDAR sensor as input and converts it into a 2D Bird's Eye View Map on both devices. Each network independently extracts its input features along space and time dimensions and produces outputs parallelly. The proposed method's model is trained on a system with two NVIDIA T4 GPUs, using a combination of loss functions, including edge preservation, and demonstrates a 2x speedup in model inference time compared to a sequential configuration. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/suwesh/Parallel-Perception-Network. Learned parameters of the trained networks are provided at: https://huggingface.co/suwesh/ParallelPerceptionNetwork.

3D lane detection from monocular images is a fundamental yet challenging task in autonomous driving. Recent advances primarily rely on structural 3D surrogates (e.g., bird's eye view) built from front-view image features and camera parameters. However, the depth ambiguity in monocular images inevitably causes misalignment between the constructed surrogate feature map and the original image, posing a great challenge for accurate lane detection. To address the above issue, we present a novel LATR model, an end-to-end 3D lane detector that uses 3D-aware front-view features without transformed view representation. Specifically, LATR detects 3D lanes via cross-attention based on query and key-value pairs, constructed using our lane-aware query generator and dynamic 3D ground positional embedding. On the one hand, each query is generated based on 2D lane-aware features and adopts a hybrid embedding to enhance lane information. On the other hand, 3D space information is injected as positional embedding from an iteratively-updated 3D ground plane. LATR outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic Apollo, realistic OpenLane and ONCE-3DLanes by large margins (e.g., 11.4 gain in terms of F1 score on OpenLane). Code will be released at https://github.com/JMoonr/LATR .

Bias assessment of news sources is paramount for professionals, organizations, and researchers who rely on truthful evidence for information gathering and reporting. While certain bias indicators are discernible from content analysis, descriptors like political bias and fake news pose greater challenges. In this paper, we propose an extension to a recently presented news media reliability estimation method that focuses on modeling outlets and their longitudinal web interactions. Concretely, we assess the classification performance of four reinforcement learning strategies on a large news media hyperlink graph. Our experiments, targeting two challenging bias descriptors, factual reporting and political bias, showed a significant performance improvement at the source media level. Additionally, we validate our methods on the CLEF 2023 CheckThat! Lab challenge, outperforming the reported results in both, F1-score and the official MAE metric. Furthermore, we contribute by releasing the largest annotated dataset of news source media, categorized with factual reporting and political bias labels. Our findings suggest that profiling news media sources based on their hyperlink interactions over time is feasible, offering a bird's-eye view of evolving media landscapes.

Benchmarking vision-based driving policies is challenging. On one hand, open-loop evaluation with real data is easy, but these results do not reflect closed-loop performance. On the other, closed-loop evaluation is possible in simulation, but is hard to scale due to its significant computational demands. Further, the simulators available today exhibit a large domain gap to real data. This has resulted in an inability to draw clear conclusions from the rapidly growing body of research on end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present NAVSIM, a middle ground between these evaluation paradigms, where we use large datasets in combination with a non-reactive simulator to enable large-scale real-world benchmarking. Specifically, we gather simulation-based metrics, such as progress and time to collision, by unrolling bird's eye view abstractions of the test scenes for a short simulation horizon. Our simulation is non-reactive, i.e., the evaluated policy and environment do not influence each other. As we demonstrate empirically, this decoupling allows open-loop metric computation while being better aligned with closed-loop evaluations than traditional displacement errors. NAVSIM enabled a new competition held at CVPR 2024, where 143 teams submitted 463 entries, resulting in several new insights. On a large set of challenging scenarios, we observe that simple methods with moderate compute requirements such as TransFuser can match recent large-scale end-to-end driving architectures such as UniAD. Our modular framework can potentially be extended with new datasets, data curation strategies, and metrics, and will be continually maintained to host future challenges. Our code is available at https://github.com/autonomousvision/navsim.

Autonomous driving demands an integrated approach that encompasses perception, prediction, and planning, all while operating under strict energy constraints to enhance scalability and environmental sustainability. We present Spiking Autonomous Driving (SAD), the first unified Spiking Neural Network (SNN) to address the energy challenges faced by autonomous driving systems through its event-driven and energy-efficient nature. SAD is trained end-to-end and consists of three main modules: perception, which processes inputs from multi-view cameras to construct a spatiotemporal bird's eye view; prediction, which utilizes a novel dual-pathway with spiking neurons to forecast future states; and planning, which generates safe trajectories considering predicted occupancy, traffic rules, and ride comfort. Evaluated on the nuScenes dataset, SAD achieves competitive performance in perception, prediction, and planning tasks, while drawing upon the energy efficiency of SNNs. This work highlights the potential of neuromorphic computing to be applied to energy-efficient autonomous driving, a critical step toward sustainable and safety-critical automotive technology. Our code is available at https://github.com/ridgerchu/SAD.

Object detection in point clouds is an important aspect of many robotics applications such as autonomous driving. In this paper we consider the problem of encoding a point cloud into a format appropriate for a downstream detection pipeline. Recent literature suggests two types of encoders; fixed encoders tend to be fast but sacrifice accuracy, while encoders that are learned from data are more accurate, but slower. In this work we propose PointPillars, a novel encoder which utilizes PointNets to learn a representation of point clouds organized in vertical columns (pillars). While the encoded features can be used with any standard 2D convolutional detection architecture, we further propose a lean downstream network. Extensive experimentation shows that PointPillars outperforms previous encoders with respect to both speed and accuracy by a large margin. Despite only using lidar, our full detection pipeline significantly outperforms the state of the art, even among fusion methods, with respect to both the 3D and bird's eye view KITTI benchmarks. This detection performance is achieved while running at 62 Hz: a 2 - 4 fold runtime improvement. A faster version of our method matches the state of the art at 105 Hz. These benchmarks suggest that PointPillars is an appropriate encoding for object detection in point clouds.

Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a central problem in many applications, such as autonomous navigation, housekeeping robots, and augmented/virtual reality. To interface a highly sparse LiDAR point cloud with a region proposal network (RPN), most existing efforts have focused on hand-crafted feature representations, for example, a bird's eye view projection. In this work, we remove the need of manual feature engineering for 3D point clouds and propose VoxelNet, a generic 3D detection network that unifies feature extraction and bounding box prediction into a single stage, end-to-end trainable deep network. Specifically, VoxelNet divides a point cloud into equally spaced 3D voxels and transforms a group of points within each voxel into a unified feature representation through the newly introduced voxel feature encoding (VFE) layer. In this way, the point cloud is encoded as a descriptive volumetric representation, which is then connected to a RPN to generate detections. Experiments on the KITTI car detection benchmark show that VoxelNet outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D detection methods by a large margin. Furthermore, our network learns an effective discriminative representation of objects with various geometries, leading to encouraging results in 3D detection of pedestrians and cyclists, based on only LiDAR.

LiDAR and Radar are two complementary sensing approaches in that LiDAR specializes in capturing an object's 3D shape while Radar provides longer detection ranges as well as velocity hints. Though seemingly natural, how to efficiently combine them for improved feature representation is still unclear. The main challenge arises from that Radar data are extremely sparse and lack height information. Therefore, directly integrating Radar features into LiDAR-centric detection networks is not optimal. In this work, we introduce a bi-directional LiDAR-Radar fusion framework, termed Bi-LRFusion, to tackle the challenges and improve 3D detection for dynamic objects. Technically, Bi-LRFusion involves two steps: first, it enriches Radar's local features by learning important details from the LiDAR branch to alleviate the problems caused by the absence of height information and extreme sparsity; second, it combines LiDAR features with the enhanced Radar features in a unified bird's-eye-view representation. We conduct extensive experiments on nuScenes and ORR datasets, and show that our Bi-LRFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance for detecting dynamic objects. Notably, Radar data in these two datasets have different formats, which demonstrates the generalizability of our method. Codes are available at https://github.com/JessieW0806/BiLRFusion.

Monocular 3D lane detection is a challenging task due to its lack of depth information. A popular solution is to first transform the front-viewed (FV) images or features into the bird-eye-view (BEV) space with inverse perspective mapping (IPM) and detect lanes from BEV features. However, the reliance of IPM on flat ground assumption and loss of context information make it inaccurate to restore 3D information from BEV representations. An attempt has been made to get rid of BEV and predict 3D lanes from FV representations directly, while it still underperforms other BEV-based methods given its lack of structured representation for 3D lanes. In this paper, we define 3D lane anchors in the 3D space and propose a BEV-free method named Anchor3DLane to predict 3D lanes directly from FV representations. 3D lane anchors are projected to the FV features to extract their features which contain both good structural and context information to make accurate predictions. In addition, we also develop a global optimization method that makes use of the equal-width property between lanes to reduce the lateral error of predictions. Extensive experiments on three popular 3D lane detection benchmarks show that our Anchor3DLane outperforms previous BEV-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performances. The code is available at: https://github.com/tusen-ai/Anchor3DLane.