Lidar sensors are often used in mobile robots and autonomous vehicles to complement camera, radar and ultrasonic sensors for environment perception. Typically, perception algorithms are trained to only detect moving and static objects as well as ground estimation, but intentionally ignore weather effects to reduce false detections. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of automotive lidar performance under harsh weather conditions, i.e. heavy rain and dense fog. An extensive data set has been recorded for various fog and rain conditions, which is the basis for the conducted in-depth analysis of the point cloud under changing environmental conditions. In addition, we introduce a novel approach to detect and classify rain or fog with lidar sensors only and achieve an mean union over intersection of 97.14 % for a data set in controlled environments. The analysis of weather influences on the performance of lidar sensors and the weather detection are important steps towards improving safety levels for autonomous driving in adverse weather conditions by providing reliable information to adapt vehicle behavior.
Simulating Automotive Radar with Lidar and Camera Inputs
Institute of Robotics and Automatic Information System, Nankai University（机器人与自动信息系统研究所，南开大学）；Tianjin Key Laboratory of Intelligent Robotics（天津智能机器人重点实验室）；TBI center, Nankai University（南开大学TBI中心）；Department of Robotics, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)（人工智能 Mohamed Bin Zayed 大学机器人系）
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）；Sensorcortek Inc（森索科泰克公司）；Valeo（法雷奥公司）
Camera and Lidar processing have been revolutionized with the rapid development of deep learning model architectures. Automotive radar is one of the crucial elements of automated driver assistance and autonomous driving systems. Radar still relies on traditional signal processing techniques, unlike camera and Lidar based methods. We believe this is the missing link to achieve the most robust perception system. Identifying drivable space and occupied space is the first step in any autonomous decision making task. Occupancy grid map representation of the environment is often used for this purpos…
Autonomous driving at level five does not only means self-driving in the sunshine. Adverse weather is especially critical because fog, rain, and snow degrade the perception of the environment. In this work, current state of the art light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors are tested in controlled conditions in a fog chamber. We present current problems and disturbance patterns for four different state of the art lidar systems. Moreover, we investigate how tuning internal parameters can improve their performance in bad weather situations. This is of great importance because most state of the…
Improving Robustness of LiDAR-Camera Fusion Model against Weather Corruption from Fusion Strategy Perspective
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局）；New York University（纽约大学）
Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, National Land Survey of Finland（芬兰国家土地调查局芬兰地理空间研究所（FGI））；Aalto University School of Science（阿尔托大学理学院）
Autonomous driving is challenging in adverse road and weather conditions in which there might not be lane lines, the road might be covered in snow and the visibility might be poor. We extend the previous work on end-to-end learning for autonomous steering to operate in these adverse real-life conditions with multimodal data. We collected 28 hours of driving data in several road and weather conditions and trained convolutional neural networks to predict the car steering wheel angle from front-facing color camera images and lidar range and reflectance data. We compared the CNN model performances…
Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院电信巴黎）
High quality perception is essential for autonomous driving (AD) systems. To reach the accuracy and robustness that are required by such systems, several types of sensors must be combined. Currently, mostly cameras and laser scanners (lidar) are deployed to build a representation of the world around the vehicle. While radar sensors have been used for a long time in the automotive industry, they are still under-used for AD despite their appealing characteristics (notably, their ability to measure the relative speed of obstacles and to operate even in adverse weather conditions). To a large exte…
In this work, we present LIBRE: LiDAR Benchmarking and Reference, a first-of-its-kind dataset featuring 10 different LiDAR sensors, covering a range of manufacturers, models, and laser configurations. Data captured independently from each sensor includes three different environments and configurations: static targets, where objects were placed at known distances and measured from a fixed position within a controlled environment; adverse weather, where static obstacles were measured from a moving vehicle, captured in a weather chamber where LiDARs were exposed to different conditions (fog, rain…
Brandeis University（布兰迪斯大学）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories（三菱电机研究实验室）
We consider the object recognition problem in autonomous driving using automotive radar sensors. Comparing to Lidar sensors, radar is cost-effective and robust in all-weather conditions for perception in autonomous driving. However, radar signals suffer from low angular resolution and precision in recognizing surrounding objects. To enhance the capacity of automotive radar, in this work, we exploit the temporal information from successive ego-centric bird-eye-view radar image frames for radar object recognition. We leverage the consistency of an object's existence and attributes (size, orienta…
Guided Model-based LiDAR Super-Resolution for Resource-Efficient Automotive scene Segmentation
Industrial Systems Institute, Athena Research Center, Patras Science Park, Greece（工业系统研究所，亚特兰蒂斯研究中心，帕特拉科学公园，希腊）；AviSense.AI, Patras Science Park, Greece（AviSense.AI，帕特拉科学公园，希腊）
Lidar sensors are widely used in various applications, ranging from scientific fields over industrial use to integration in consumer products. With an ever growing number of different driver assistance systems, they have been introduced to automotive series production in recent years and are considered an important building block for the practical realisation of autonomous driving. However, due to the potentially large amount of Lidar points per scan, tailored algorithms are required to identify objects (e.g. pedestrians or vehicles) with high precision in a very short time. In this work, we p…
Moving object detection and segmentation is an essential task in the Autonomous Driving pipeline. Detecting and isolating static and moving components of a vehicle's surroundings are particularly crucial in path planning and localization tasks. This paper proposes a novel real-time architecture for motion segmentation of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) data. We use three successive scans of LiDAR data in 2D Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation to perform pixel-wise classification as static or moving. Furthermore, we propose a novel data augmentation technique to reduce the significant clas…
WeatherGen: A Unified Diverse Weather Generator for LiDAR Point Clouds via Spider Mamba Diffusion
PCA Lab, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学光电信息科学与工程实验室）；School of Automation, Southeast University（东南大学自动化学院）；State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学软件新技术国家重点实验室）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学智能科学与技术学院）
New York University（纽约大学）；NXP Semiconductors（恩智浦半导体）
Among various sensors for assisted and autonomous driving systems, automotive radar has been considered as a robust and low-cost solution even in adverse weather or lighting conditions. With the recent development of radar technologies and open-sourced annotated data sets, semantic segmentation with radar signals has become very promising. However, existing methods are either computationally expensive or discard significant amounts of valuable information from raw 3D radar signals by reducing them to 2D planes via averaging. In this work, we introduce ERASE-Net, an Efficient RAdar SEgmentation…
LiCROcc: Teach Radar for Accurate Semantic Occupancy Prediction using LiDAR and Camera
Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University（浙江大学 cyber 系统与控制研究所）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Autonomous driving is rapidly advancing, and Level 2 functions are becoming a standard feature. One of the foremost outstanding hurdles is to obtain robust visual perception in harsh weather and low light conditions where accuracy degradation is severe. It is critical to have a weather classification model to decrease visual perception confidence during these scenarios. Thus, we have built a new dataset for weather (fog, rain, and snow) classification and light level (bright, moderate, and low) classification. Furthermore, we provide street type (asphalt, grass, and cobblestone) classification…
Rigid Point Cloud Registration (PCR) algorithms aim to estimate the 6-DOF relative motion between two point clouds, which is important in various fields, including autonomous driving. Recent years have seen a significant improvement in global PCR algorithms, i.e. algorithms that can handle a large relative motion. This has been demonstrated in various scenarios, including indoor scenes, but has only been minimally tested in the Automotive setting, where point clouds are produced by vehicle-mounted LiDAR sensors. In this work, we aim to answer questions that are important for automotive applica…
Robust semantic scene segmentation for automotive applications is a challenging problem in two key aspects: (1) labelling every individual scene pixel and (2) performing this task under unstable weather and illumination changes (e.g., foggy weather), which results in poor outdoor scene visibility. Such visibility limitations lead to non-optimal performance of generalised deep convolutional neural network-based semantic scene segmentation. In this paper, we propose an efficient end-to-end automotive semantic scene understanding approach that is robust to foggy weather conditions. As an end-to-e…
ResLPR: A LiDAR Data Restoration Network and Benchmark for Robust Place Recognition Against Weather Corruptions
College of Intelligence Science and Technology（智能科学与技术学院）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Weather-Conditioned Branch Routing for Robust LiDAR-Radar 3D Object Detection
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University（福州大学计算机与数据科学学院）；Institute of Information Engineering, CAS（中国科学院信息工程研究所）
Robust Single Object Tracking in LiDAR Point Clouds under Adverse Weather Conditions
School of Mathematical Sciences, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学数学科学学院）；School of Economics and Management, China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学经济管理学院）；DUT-BSU Joint Institute, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学-白俄罗斯国立大学联合学院）
Università degli Studi di Milano - Bicocca（米兰比可卡大学）；University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；Universidad de Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）
Global localization is an important and widely studied problem for many robotic applications. Place recognition approaches can be exploited to solve this task, e.g., in the autonomous driving field. While most vision-based approaches match an image w.r.t. an image database, global visual localization within LiDAR-maps remains fairly unexplored, even though the path toward high definition 3D maps, produced mainly from LiDARs, is clear. In this work we leverage Deep Neural Network (DNN) approaches to create a shared embedding space between images and LiDAR-maps, allowing for image to 3D-LiDAR pl…
A Unified Generative Framework for Realistic Lidar Simulation in Autonomous Driving Systems
WMG, University of Warwick（华威大学WMG学院）；School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University of Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学电子、电气工程与计算机科学学院）
Handong Global University（韩东国际大学）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）
A misalignment of LiDAR as low as a few degrees could cause a significant error in obstacle detection and mapping that could cause safety and quality issues. In this paper, an accurate inspection system is proposed for estimating a LiDAR alignment error after sensor attachment on a mobility system such as a vehicle or robot. The proposed method uses only a single target board at the fixed position to estimate the three orientations (roll, tilt, and yaw) and the horizontal position of the LiDAR attachment with sub-degree and millimeter level accuracy. After the proposed preprocessing steps, the…
Institute of Sensors, Signals and Systems, Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学传感器、信号与系统研究所）
Datasets for autonomous cars are essential for the development and benchmarking of perception systems. However, most existing datasets are captured with camera and LiDAR sensors in good weather conditions. In this paper, we present the RAdar Dataset In Adverse weaThEr (RADIATE), aiming to facilitate research on object detection, tracking and scene understanding using radar sensing for safe autonomous driving. RADIATE includes 3 hours of annotated radar images with more than 200K labelled road actors in total, on average about 4.6 instances per radar image. It covers 8 different categories of a…
Joint scene understanding and segmentation for automotive applications is a challenging problem in two key aspects:- (1) classifying every pixel in the entire scene and (2) performing this task under unstable weather and illumination changes (e.g. foggy weather), which results in poor outdoor scene visibility. This poor outdoor scene visibility leads to a non-optimal performance of deep convolutional neural network-based scene understanding and segmentation. In this paper, we propose an efficient end-to-end contemporary automotive semantic scene understanding approach under foggy weather condi…
Daimler AG（戴姆勒股份公司）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Lidar sensors are frequently used in environment perception for autonomous vehicles and mobile robotics to complement camera, radar, and ultrasonic sensors. Adverse weather conditions are significantly impacting the performance of lidar-based scene understanding by causing undesired measurement points that in turn effect missing detections and false positives. In heavy rain or dense fog, water drops could be misinterpreted as objects in front of the vehicle which brings a mobile robot to a full stop. In this paper, we present the first CNN-based approach to understand and filter out such adver…
LiMoE: Mixture of LiDAR Representation Learners from Automotive Scenes
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学）；S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学S-Lab）
Tier IV Inc.（Tier IV公司）；The National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience（国立地球科学与防灾研究所）；Nagoya University（名古屋大学）
Robust sensing and perception in adverse weather conditions remain one of the biggest challenges for realizing reliable autonomous vehicle mobility services. Prior work has established that rainfall rate is a useful measure for the adversity of atmospheric weather conditions. This work presents a probabilistic hierarchical Bayesian model that infers rainfall rate from automotive lidar point cloud sequences with high accuracy and reliability. The model is a hierarchical mixture of experts model, or a probabilistic decision tree, with gating and expert nodes consisting of variational logistic an…
