Daily Papers

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 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.

Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) use multiple sensors to gather information about their surroundings. By sharing sensor data between Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), the safety and reliability of these vehicles can be improved through a concept known as cooperative perception. However, recent approaches in cooperative perception only share single sensor information such as cameras or LiDAR. In this research, we explore the fusion of multiple sensor data sources and present a framework, called CoBEVFusion, that fuses LiDAR and camera data to create a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. The CAVs process the multi-modal data locally and utilize a Dual Window-based Cross-Attention (DWCA) module to fuse the LiDAR and camera features into a unified BEV representation. The fused BEV feature maps are shared among the CAVs, and a 3D Convolutional Neural Network is applied to aggregate the features from the CAVs. Our CoBEVFusion framework was evaluated on the cooperative perception dataset OPV2V for two perception tasks: BEV semantic segmentation and 3D object detection. The results show that our DWCA LiDAR-camera fusion model outperforms perception models with single-modal data and state-of-the-art BEV fusion models. Our overall cooperative perception architecture, CoBEVFusion, also achieves comparable performance with other cooperative perception models.

Object perception from multi-view cameras is crucial for intelligent systems, particularly in indoor environments, e.g., warehouses, retail stores, and hospitals. Most traditional multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) detection and tracking methods rely on 2D object detection, single-view multi-object tracking (MOT), and cross-view re-identification (ReID) techniques, without properly handling important 3D information by multi-view image aggregation. In this paper, we propose a 3D object detection and tracking framework, named BEV-SUSHI, which first aggregates multi-view images with necessary camera calibration parameters to obtain 3D object detections in bird's-eye view (BEV). Then, we introduce hierarchical graph neural networks (GNNs) to track these 3D detections in BEV for MTMC tracking results. Unlike existing methods, BEV-SUSHI has impressive generalizability across different scenes and diverse camera settings, with exceptional capability for long-term association handling. As a result, our proposed BEV-SUSHI establishes the new state-of-the-art on the AICity'24 dataset with 81.22 HOTA, and 95.6 IDF1 on the WildTrack dataset.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 .

This article introduces BEVPlace++, a novel, fast, and robust LiDAR global localization method for unmanned ground vehicles. It uses lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on Bird's Eye View (BEV) image-like representations of LiDAR data to achieve accurate global localization through place recognition, followed by 3-DoF pose estimation. Our detailed analyses reveal an interesting fact that CNNs are inherently effective at extracting distinctive features from LiDAR BEV images. Remarkably, keypoints of two BEV images with large translations can be effectively matched using CNN-extracted features. Building on this insight, we design a Rotation Equivariant Module (REM) to obtain distinctive features while enhancing robustness to rotational changes. A Rotation Equivariant and Invariant Network (REIN) is then developed by cascading REM and a descriptor generator, NetVLAD, to sequentially generate rotation equivariant local features and rotation invariant global descriptors. The global descriptors are used first to achieve robust place recognition, and then local features are used for accurate pose estimation. Experimental results on seven public datasets and our UGV platform demonstrate that BEVPlace++, even when trained on a small dataset (3000 frames of KITTI) only with place labels, generalizes well to unseen environments, performs consistently across different days and years, and adapts to various types of LiDAR scanners. BEVPlace++ achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple tasks, including place recognition, loop closure detection, and global localization. Additionally, BEVPlace++ is lightweight, runs in real-time, and does not require accurate pose supervision, making it highly convenient for deployment. \revise{The source codes are publicly available at https://github.com/zjuluolun/BEVPlace2.