A major challenge in place recognition for autonomous driving is to be robust against appearance changes due to short-term (e.g., weather, lighting) and long-term (seasons, vegetation growth, etc.) environmental variations. A promising solution is to continuously accumulate images to maintain an adequate sample of the conditions and incorporate new changes into the place recognition decision. However, this demands a place recognition technique that is scalable on an ever growing dataset. To this end, we propose a novel place recognition technique that can be efficiently retrained and compressed, such that the recognition of new queries can exploit all available data (including recent changes) without suffering from visible growth in computational cost. Underpinning our method is a novel temporal image matching technique based on Hidden Markov Models. Our experiments show that, compared to state-of-the-art techniques, our method has much greater potential for large-scale place recognition for autonomous driving.
University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
This paper presents a lightweight visual place recognition approach, capable of achieving high performance with low computational cost, and feasible for mobile robotics under significant viewpoint and appearance changes. Results on several benchmark datasets confirm an average boost of 13% in accuracy, and 12x average speedup relative to state-of-the-art methods.
We propose a novel multi-task learning system that combines appearance and motion cues for a better semantic reasoning of the environment. A unified architecture for joint vehicle detection and motion segmentation is introduced. In this architecture, a two-stream encoder is shared among both tasks. In order to evaluate our method in autonomous driving setting, KITTI annotated sequences with detection and odometry ground truth are used to automatically generate static/dynamic annotations on the vehicles. This dataset is called KITTI Moving Object Detection dataset (KITTI MOD). The dataset will …
Human visual scene understanding is so remarkable that we are able to recognize a revisited place when entering it from the opposite direction it was first visited, even in the presence of extreme variations in appearance. This capability is especially apparent during driving: a human driver can recognize where they are when travelling in the reverse direction along a route for the first time, without having to turn back and look. The difficulty of this problem exceeds any addressed in past appearance- and viewpoint-invariant visual place recognition (VPR) research, in part because large parts…
Probabilistic state-estimation approaches offer a principled foundation for designing localization systems, because they naturally integrate sequences of imperfect motion and exteroceptive sensor data. Recently, probabilistic localization systems utilizing appearance-invariant visual place recognition (VPR) methods as the primary exteroceptive sensor have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in the presence of substantial appearance change. However, existing systems 1) do not fully utilize odometry data within the motion models, and 2) are unable to handle route deviations, due to the ass…
University of Málaga（马拉加大学）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）
Place recognition is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision, and has become a key part in mobile robotics and autonomous driving applications for performing loop closure in visual SLAM systems. Moreover, the difficulty of recognizing a revisited location increases with appearance changes caused, for instance, by weather or illumination variations, which hinders the long-term application of such algorithms in real environments. In this paper we present a convolutional neural network (CNN), trained for the first time with the purpose of recognizing revisited locations under seve…
Autonomous detection of lane markers improves road safety, and purely visual tracking is desirable for widespread vehicle compatibility and reducing sensor intrusion, cost, and energy consumption. However, visual approaches are often ineffective because of a number of factors; e.g., occlusion, poor weather conditions, and paint wear-off. We present an approach to enhance lane marker appearance for assisted and autonomous driving, particularly under poor visibility. Our method, named SafeDrive, attempts to improve visual lane detection approaches in drastically degraded visual conditions. SafeD…
Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation
CSIRO Robotics, Brisbane, Australia（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织机器人实验室，布里斯班，澳大利亚）；University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia（昆士兰大学，布里斯班，澳大利亚）；Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia（昆士兰科技大学，布里斯班，澳大利亚）
Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；Queensland University of Technology (QUT)（昆士兰科技大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；TATA Consultancy Services（塔塔咨询服务公司）
Visual place recognition (VPR) - the act of recognizing a familiar visual place - becomes difficult when there is extreme environmental appearance change or viewpoint change. Particularly challenging is the scenario where both phenomena occur simultaneously, such as when returning for the first time along a road at night that was previously traversed during the day in the opposite direction. While such problems can be solved with panoramic sensors, humans solve this problem regularly with limited field of view vision and without needing to constantly turn around. In this paper, we present a ne…
School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学计算机科学学院）
Visual place recognition needs to be robust against appearance variability due to natural and man-made causes. Training data collection should thus be an ongoing process to allow continuous appearance changes to be recorded. However, this creates an unboundedly-growing database that poses time and memory scalability challenges for place recognition methods. To tackle the scalability issue for visual place recognition in autonomous driving, we develop a Hidden Markov Model approach with a two-tiered memory management. Our algorithm, dubbed HM$^4$, exploits temporal look-ahead to transfer promis…
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 representatio…
IFTD: Image Feature Triangle Descriptor for Loop Detection in Driving Scenes
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能研究院）
The detection of small road hazards, such as lost cargo, is a vital capability for self-driving cars. We tackle this challenging and rarely addressed problem with a vision system that leverages appearance, contextual as well as geometric cues. To utilize the appearance and contextual cues, we propose a new deep learning-based obstacle detection framework. Here a variant of a fully convolutional network is used to predict a pixel-wise semantic labeling of (i) free-space, (ii) on-road unexpected obstacles, and (iii) background. The geometric cues are exploited using a state-of-the-art detection …
When a human drives a car along a road for the first time, they later recognize where they are on the return journey typically without needing to look in their rear-view mirror or turn around to look back, despite significant viewpoint and appearance change. Such navigation capabilities are typically attributed to our semantic visual understanding of the environment [1] beyond geometry to recognizing the types of places we are passing through such as "passing a shop on the left" or "moving through a forested area". Humans are in effect using place categorization [2] to perform specific place r…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Amazon（亚马逊）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
The past few years have witnessed an increasing interest in improving the perception performance of LiDARs on autonomous vehicles. While most of the existing works focus on developing new deep learning algorithms or model architectures, we study the problem from the physical design perspective, i.e., how different placements of multiple LiDARs influence the learning-based perception. To this end, we introduce an easy-to-compute information-theoretic surrogate metric to quantitatively and fast evaluate LiDAR placement for 3D detection of different types of objects. We also present a new data co…
The 1st-place Solution for CVPR 2023 OpenLane Topology in Autonomous Driving Challenge
MEGVII Technology（旷视科技）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Visual localization techniques often comprise a hierarchical localization pipeline, with a visual place recognition module used as a coarse localizer to initialize a pose refinement stage. While improving the pose refinement step has been the focus of much recent research, most work on the coarse localization stage has focused on improvements like increased invariance to appearance change, without improving what can be loose error tolerances. In this letter, we propose two methods which adapt image retrieval techniques used for visual place recognition to the Bayesian state estimation formulat…
Place recognition is a key module in robotic navigation. The existing line of studies mostly focuses on visual place recognition to recognize previously visited places solely based on their appearance. In this paper, we address structural place recognition by recognizing a place based on structural appearance, namely from range sensors. Extending our previous work on a rotation invariant spatial descriptor, the proposed descriptor completes a generic descriptor robust to both rotation (heading) and translation when roll-pitch motions are not severe. We introduce two sub-descriptors and enable …
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学电气与电子工程学院）；Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
As an essential component of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), place recognition is crucial for robot navigation and autonomous driving. Existing methods often formulate visual place recognition as feature matching, which is computationally expensive for many robotic applications with limited computing power, e.g., autonomous driving and cleaning robot. Inspired by the fact that human beings always recognize a place by remembering salient regions or landmarks that are more attractive or interesting than others, we formulate visual place recognition as saliency re-identificat…
Multi-Platform Teach-and-Repeat Navigation by Visual Place Recognition Based on Deep-Learned Local Features
Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学信息学、机器人学与控制论研究所）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学电气工程学院）
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently been shown to excel at performing visual place recognition under changing appearance and viewpoint. Previously, place recognition has been improved by intelligently selecting relevant spatial keypoints within a convolutional layer and also by selecting the optimal layer to use. Rather than extracting features out of a particular layer, or a particular set of spatial keypoints within a layer, we propose the extraction of features using a subset of the channel dimensionality within a layer. Each feature map learns to encode a different set of we…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Place recognition is the fundamental module that can assist Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in loop-closure detection and re-localization for long-term navigation. The place recognition community has made astonishing progress over the last $20$ years, and this has attracted widespread research interest and application in multiple fields such as computer vision and robotics. However, few methods have shown promising place recognition performance in complex real-world scenarios, where long-term and large-scale appearance changes usually result in failures. Additionally, there is a l…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Place recognition and loop-closure detection are main challenges in the localization, mapping and navigation tasks of self-driving vehicles. In this paper, we solve the loop-closure detection problem by incorporating the deep-learning based point cloud description method and the coarse-to-fine sequence matching strategy. More specifically, we propose a deep neural network to extract a global descriptor from the original large-scale 3D point cloud, then based on which, a typical place analysis approach is presented to investigate the feature space distribution of the global descriptors and sele…
Australian Center for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Place recognition is an essential component of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). Under severe appearance change, reliable place recognition is a difficult perception task since the same place is perceptually very different in the morning, at night, or over different seasons. This work addresses place recognition as a domain translation task. Using a pair of coupled Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we show that it is possible to generate the appearance of one domain (such as summer) from another (such as winter) without requiring image-to-image correspondences across the doma…
ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science（澳大利亚国立大学工程与计算机科学学院）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Visual position recognition affects the safety and accuracy of automatic driving. To accurately identify the location, this paper studies a visual place recognition algorithm based on HMM filter and HMM smoother. Firstly, we constructed the traffic situations in Canberra city. Then the mathematical models of the HMM filter and HMM smoother were performed. Finally, the vehicle position was predicted based on the algorithms. Experiment results show that HMM smoother is better than HMM filter in terms of prediction accuracy.
Place recognition is a challenging problem in mobile robotics, especially in unstructured environments or under viewpoint and illumination changes. Most LiDAR-based methods rely on geometrical features to overcome such challenges, as generally scene geometry is invariant to these changes, but tend to affect camera-based solutions significantly. Compared to cameras, however, LiDARs lack the strong and descriptive appearance information that imaging can provide. To combine the benefits of geometry and appearance, we propose coupling the conventional geometric information from the LiDAR with its …
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术学院）；Clemson University（克莱姆森大学）
Accurate localization on autonomous driving cars is essential for autonomy and driving safety, especially for complex urban streets and search-and-rescue subterranean environments where high-accurate GPS is not available. However current odometry estimation may introduce the drifting problems in long-term navigation without robust global localization. The main challenges involve scene divergence under the interference of dynamic environments and effective perception of observation and object layout variance from different viewpoints. To tackle these challenges, we present PSE-Match, a viewpoin…
In autonomous driving, accurately estimating the state of surrounding obstacles is critical for safe and robust path planning. However, this perception task is difficult, particularly for generic obstacles/objects, due to appearance and occlusion changes. To tackle this problem, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for LIDAR-based flow estimation in bird's eye view (BeV). Our method takes consecutive point cloud pairs as input and produces a 2-D BeV flow grid describing the dynamic state of each cell. The experimental results show that the proposed method not only estimates 2-D BeV…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
We present BioSLAM, a lifelong SLAM framework for learning various new appearances incrementally and maintaining accurate place recognition for previously visited areas. Unlike humans, artificial neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting and may forget the previously visited areas when trained with new arrivals. For humans, researchers discover that there exists a memory replay mechanism in the brain to keep the neuron active for previous events. Inspired by this discovery, BioSLAM designs a gated generative replay to control the robot's learning behavior based on the feedback reward…
Motion is an important cue for video prediction and often utilized by separating video content into static and dynamic components. Most of the previous work utilizing motion is deterministic but there are stochastic methods that can model the inherent uncertainty of the future. Existing stochastic models either do not reason about motion explicitly or make limiting assumptions about the static part. In this paper, we reason about appearance and motion in the video stochastically by predicting the future based on the motion history. Explicit reasoning about motion without history already reache…
Multi-modality fusion is the guarantee of the stability of autonomous driving systems. In this paper, we propose a general multi-modality cascaded fusion framework, exploiting the advantages of decision-level and feature-level fusion, utilizing target position, size, velocity, appearance and confidence to achieve accurate fusion results. In the fusion process, dynamic coordinate alignment(DCA) is conducted to reduce the error between sensors from different modalities. In addition, the calculation of affinity matrix is the core module of sensor fusion, we propose an affinity loss that improves …
Self-driving vehicles have expanded dramatically over the last few years. Udacity has release a dataset containing, among other data, a set of images with the steering angle captured during driving. The Udacity challenge aimed to predict steering angle based on only the provided images. We explore two different models to perform high quality prediction of steering angles based on images using different deep learning techniques including Transfer Learning, 3D CNN, LSTM and ResNet. If the Udacity challenge was still ongoing, both of our models would have placed in the top ten of all entries.
Panacea+: Panoramic and Controllable Video Generation for Autonomous Driving
School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学信息科学技术学院）；MEGVII Technology（旷视科技）；School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学遥感信息工程学院）；Mach Drive（马赫驾驶）
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Sifakis Research Institute of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学西法基斯可信自主系统研究院）；Pazhou Lab（琶洲实验室）
Multi-object tracking (MOT) with camera-LiDAR fusion demands accurate results of object detection, affinity computation and data association in real time. This paper presents an efficient multi-modal MOT framework with online joint detection and tracking schemes and robust data association for autonomous driving applications. The novelty of this work includes: (1) development of an end-to-end deep neural network for joint object detection and correlation using 2D and 3D measurements; (2) development of a robust affinity computation module to compute occlusion-aware appearance and motion affini…
Semantic segmentation approaches are typically trained on large-scale data with a closed finite set of known classes without considering unknown objects. In certain safety-critical robotics applications, especially autonomous driving, it is important to segment all objects, including those unknown at training time. We formalize the task of video class agnostic segmentation from monocular video sequences in autonomous driving to account for unknown objects. Video class agnostic segmentation can be formulated as an open-set or a motion segmentation problem. We discuss both formulations and provi…
Cleveland State University（克利夫兰州立大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Most object detection methods for autonomous driving usually assume a consistent feature distribution between training and testing data, which is not always the case when weathers differ significantly. The object detection model trained under clear weather might not be effective enough in foggy weather because of the domain gap. This paper proposes a novel domain adaptive object detection framework for autonomous driving under foggy weather. Our method leverages both image-level and object-level adaptation to diminish the domain discrepancy in image style and object appearance. To further enha…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Multi-task learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm to solve a range of tasks simultaneously with good efficiency in both computation resources and inference time. However, these algorithms are designed for different tasks mostly not within the scope of autonomous driving, thus making it hard to compare multi-task methods in autonomous driving. Aiming to enable the comprehensive evaluation of present multi-task learning methods in autonomous driving, we extensively investigate the performance of popular multi-task methods on the large-scale driving dataset, which covers four common percepti…
Kookmin University（国民大学）；Hanyang University（汉阳大学）；University of California, Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
For realizing safe autonomous driving, the end-to-end delays of real-time object detection systems should be thoroughly analyzed and minimized. However, despite recent development of neural networks with minimized inference delays, surprisingly little attention has been paid to their end-to-end delays from an object's appearance until its detection is reported. With this motivation, this paper aims to provide more comprehensive understanding of the end-to-end delay, through which precise best- and worst-case delay predictions are formulated, and three optimization methods are implemented: (i) …
