Recent advancements in statistical learning and computational abilities have enabled autonomous vehicle technology to develop at a much faster rate. While many of the architectures previously introduced are capable of operating under highly dynamic environments, many of these are constrained to smaller-scale deployments, require constant maintenance due to the associated scalability cost with high-definition (HD) maps, and involve tedious manual labeling. As an attempt to tackle this problem, we propose to fuse image and pre-built point cloud map information to perform automatic and accurate labeling of static landmarks such as roads, sidewalks, crosswalks, and lanes. The method performs semantic segmentation on 2D images, associates the semantic labels with point cloud maps to accurately localize them in the world, and leverages the confusion matrix formulation to construct a probabilistic semantic map in bird's eye view from semantic point clouds. Experiments from data collected in an urban environment show that this model is able to predict most road features and can be extended for automatically incorporating road features into HD maps with potential future work directions.
Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）
State-of-the-art (SOTA) anomaly segmentation approaches on complex urban driving scenes explore pixel-wise classification uncertainty learned from outlier exposure, or external reconstruction models. However, previous uncertainty approaches that directly associate high uncertainty to anomaly may sometimes lead to incorrect anomaly predictions, and external reconstruction models tend to be too inefficient for real-time self-driving embedded systems. In this paper, we propose a new anomaly segmentation method, named pixel-wise energy-biased abstention learning (PEBAL), that explores pixel-wise a…
We introduce a motion forecasting (behavior prediction) method that meets the latency requirements for autonomous driving in dense urban environments without sacrificing accuracy. A whole-scene sparse input representation allows StopNet to scale to predicting trajectories for hundreds of road agents with reliable latency. In addition to predicting trajectories, our scene encoder lends itself to predicting whole-scene probabilistic occupancy grids, a complementary output representation suitable for busy urban environments. Occupancy grids allow the AV to reason collectively about the behavior o…
Urban autonomous driving decision making is challenging due to complex road geometry and multi-agent interactions. Current decision making methods are mostly manually designing the driving policy, which might result in sub-optimal solutions and is expensive to develop, generalize and maintain at scale. On the other hand, with reinforcement learning (RL), a policy can be learned and improved automatically without any manual designs. However, current RL methods generally do not work well on complex urban scenarios. In this paper, we propose a framework to enable model-free deep reinforcement lea…
Contextual Robotics Institute, University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校语境机器人研究所）
Calibration of sensors is fundamental to robust performance for intelligent vehicles. In natural environments, disturbances can easily challenge calibration. One possibility is to use natural objects of known shape to recalibrate sensors. An approach based on recognition of traffic signs, such as stop signs, and use of them for recalibration of cameras is presented. The approach is based on detection, geometry estimation, calibration, and recursive updating. Results from natural environments are presented that clearly show convergence and improved performance.
Computer Vision Center（计算机视觉中心）；Intel Labs（英特尔研究院）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）
We introduce CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research. CARLA has been developed from the ground up to support development, training, and validation of autonomous urban driving systems. In addition to open-source code and protocols, CARLA provides open digital assets (urban layouts, buildings, vehicles) that were created for this purpose and can be used freely. The simulation platform supports flexible specification of sensor suites and environmental conditions. We use CARLA to study the performance of three approaches to autonomous driving: a classic modular pipeline, an…
An accurate model of the environment and the dynamic agents acting in it offers great potential for improving motion planning. We present MILE: a Model-based Imitation LEarning approach to jointly learn a model of the world and a policy for autonomous driving. Our method leverages 3D geometry as an inductive bias and learns a highly compact latent space directly from high-resolution videos of expert demonstrations. Our model is trained on an offline corpus of urban driving data, without any online interaction with the environment. MILE improves upon prior state-of-the-art by 31% in driving sco…
Hand-crafting generalised decision-making rules for real-world urban autonomous driving is hard. Alternatively, learning behaviour from easy-to-collect human driving demonstrations is appealing. Prior work has studied imitation learning (IL) for autonomous driving with a number of limitations. Examples include only performing lane-following rather than following a user-defined route, only using a single camera view or heavily cropped frames lacking state observability, only lateral (steering) control, but not longitudinal (speed) control and a lack of interaction with traffic. Importantly, the…
Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC)（中欧理工学院 (CEITEC)）；Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）
Autonomous driving is a dynamically growing field of research, where quality and amount of experimental data is critical. Although several rich datasets are available these days, the demands of researchers and technical possibilities are evolving. Through this paper, we bring a new dataset recorded in Brno, Czech Republic. It offers data from four WUXGA cameras, two 3D LiDARs, inertial measurement unit, infrared camera and especially differential RTK GNSS receiver with centimetre accuracy which, to the best knowledge of the authors, is not available from any other public dataset so far. In add…
Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigation
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Li Auto Inc.（理想汽车）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
In this work we are the first to present an offline policy gradient method for learning imitative policies for complex urban driving from a large corpus of real-world demonstrations. This is achieved by building a differentiable data-driven simulator on top of perception outputs and high-fidelity HD maps of the area. It allows us to synthesize new driving experiences from existing demonstrations using mid-level representations. Using this simulator we then train a policy network in closed-loop employing policy gradients. We train our proposed method on 100 hours of expert demonstrations on urb…
Computer Vision Lab, ETH Zürich（计算机视觉实验室，苏黎世联邦理工学院）；MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息研究所）；PSI, KU Leuven（PSI，鲁汶大学）
End-to-end approaches to autonomous driving commonly rely on expert demonstrations. Although humans are good drivers, they are not good coaches for end-to-end algorithms that demand dense on-policy supervision. On the contrary, automated experts that leverage privileged information can efficiently generate large scale on-policy and off-policy demonstrations. However, existing automated experts for urban driving make heavy use of hand-crafted rules and perform suboptimally even on driving simulators, where ground-truth information is available. To address these issues, we train a reinforcement …
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Unlike popular modularized framework, end-to-end autonomous driving seeks to solve the perception, decision and control problems in an integrated way, which can be more adapting to new scenarios and easier to generalize at scale. However, existing end-to-end approaches are often lack of interpretability, and can only deal with simple driving tasks like lane keeping. In this paper, we propose an interpretable deep reinforcement learning method for end-to-end autonomous driving, which is able to handle complex urban scenarios. A sequential latent environment model is introduced and learned joint…
The majority of current approaches in autonomous driving rely on High-Definition (HD) maps which detail the road geometry and surrounding area. Yet, this reliance is one of the obstacles to mass deployment of autonomous vehicles due to poor scalability of such prior maps. In this paper, we tackle the problem of online road map extraction via leveraging the sensory system aboard the vehicle itself. To this end, we design a structured model where a graph representation of the road network is generated in a hierarchical fashion within a fully convolutional network. The method is able to handle co…
Multi-LiDAR Localization and Mapping Pipeline for Urban Autonomous Driving
Institute of Automotive Technology, Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学汽车技术研究所，慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）；Professorship Autonomous Vehicle Systems, Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学自动驾驶车辆系统教授席，慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究所）
Lane-level scene annotations provide invaluable data in autonomous vehicles for trajectory planning in complex environments such as urban areas and cities. However, obtaining such data is time-consuming and expensive since lane annotations have to be annotated manually by humans and are as such hard to scale to large areas. In this work, we propose a novel approach for lane geometry estimation from bird's-eye-view images. We formulate the problem of lane shape and lane connections estimation as a graph estimation problem where lane anchor points are graph nodes and lane segments are graph edge…
RLAD: Reinforcement Learning from Pixels for Autonomous Driving in Urban Environments
University of Aveiro（阿威罗大学）；Intelligent System Associate Laboratory (LASI)（智能系统联合实验室（LASI））；Institute of Electronics and Informatics Engineering of Aveiro (IEETA)（阿威罗电子与信息工程研究所（IEETA））
MTA-RL: Robust Urban Driving via Multi-modal Transformer-based 3D Affordances and Reinforcement Learning
Dongguan Key Laboratory of Intelligent Equipment and Smart Industry, School of Advanced Engineering, Great Bay University（东莞智能装备与智能制造重点实验室，先进工程学院，大湾大学）；Chair of Applied Statistics, Technische Universität Dresden（应用统计学教授职位，德累斯顿技术大学）；Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI)（可扩展数据解析与人工智能中心（ScaDS.AI））；College of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology（自动化学院，广东技术大学）
本文提出MTA-RL框架，通过多模态Transformer-based 3D affordances和强化学习实现可靠的城市自动驾驶，提升样本效率和稳定性，优于现有基线方法。
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Traditional methods for autonomous driving are implemented with many building blocks from perception, planning and control, making them difficult to generalize to varied scenarios due to complex assumptions and interdependencies. Recently, the end-to-end driving method has emerged, which performs well and generalizes to new environments by directly learning from export-provided data. However, many existing methods on this topic neglect to check the confidence of the driving actions and the ability to recover from driving mistakes. In this paper, we develop an uncertainty-aware end-to-end traje…
Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世股份有限公司）；Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）
Reliable uncertainty estimation is crucial for perception systems in safe autonomous driving. Recently, many methods have been proposed to model uncertainties in deep learning based object detectors. However, the estimated probabilities are often uncalibrated, which may lead to severe problems in safety critical scenarios. In this work, we identify such uncertainty miscalibration problems in a probabilistic LiDAR 3D object detection network, and propose three practical methods to significantly reduce errors in uncertainty calibration. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that our met…
Ulm University（乌尔姆大学）；University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies（多伦多大学航空航天研究所）
Capturing uncertainty in object detection is indispensable for safe autonomous driving. In recent years, deep learning has become the de-facto approach for object detection, and many probabilistic object detectors have been proposed. However, there is no summary on uncertainty estimation in deep object detection, and existing methods are not only built with different network architectures and uncertainty estimation methods, but also evaluated on different datasets with a wide range of evaluation metrics. As a result, a comparison among methods remains challenging, as does the selection of a mo…
End-to-end approaches to autonomous driving have high sample complexity and are difficult to scale to realistic urban driving. Simulation can help end-to-end driving systems by providing a cheap, safe, and diverse training environment. Yet training driving policies in simulation brings up the problem of transferring such policies to the real world. We present an approach to transferring driving policies from simulation to reality via modularity and abstraction. Our approach is inspired by classic driving systems and aims to combine the benefits of modular architectures and end-to-end deep lear…
Learning to drive faithfully in highly stochastic urban settings remains an open problem. To that end, we propose a Multi-task Learning from Demonstration (MT-LfD) framework which uses supervised auxiliary task prediction to guide the main task of predicting the driving commands. Our framework involves an end-to-end trainable network for imitating the expert demonstrator's driving commands. The network intermediately predicts visual affordances and action primitives through direct supervision which provide the aforementioned auxiliary supervised guidance. We demonstrate that such joint learnin…
Oxford Robotics Institute, Dept. Engineering Science, University of Oxford（牛津大学工程科学系牛津机器人研究所）
We present a weakly-supervised approach to segmenting proposed drivable paths in images with the goal of autonomous driving in complex urban environments. Using recorded routes from a data collection vehicle, our proposed method generates vast quantities of labelled images containing proposed paths and obstacles without requiring manual annotation, which we then use to train a deep semantic segmentation network. With the trained network we can segment proposed paths and obstacles at run-time using a vehicle equipped with only a monocular camera without relying on explicit modelling of road or …
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）
How should representations from complementary sensors be integrated for autonomous driving? Geometry-based sensor fusion has shown great promise for perception tasks such as object detection and motion forecasting. However, for the actual driving task, the global context of the 3D scene is key, e.g. a change in traffic light state can affect the behavior of a vehicle geometrically distant from that traffic light. Geometry alone may therefore be insufficient for effectively fusing representations in end-to-end driving models. In this work, we demonstrate that imitation learning policies based o…
All for One, and One for All: UrbanSyn Dataset, the third Musketeer of Synthetic Driving Scenes
Computer Vision Center (CVC)（计算机视觉中心）；CITIC - Centre for ICT Research（ICT研究中心）；NVIDIA（NVIDIA公司）；Computer Science Department, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机科学系）；Universidade da Coruña (UDC)（科鲁纳大学）
Biases can filter into AI technology without our knowledge. Oftentimes, seminal deep learning networks champion increased accuracy above all else. In this paper, we attempt to alleviate biases encountered by semantic segmentation models in urban driving scenes, via an iteratively trained unlearning algorithm. Convolutional neural networks have been shown to rely on colour and texture rather than geometry. This raises issues when safety-critical applications, such as self-driving cars, encounter images with covariate shift at test time - induced by variations such as lighting changes or seasona…
Urban Traffic Surveillance (UTS) is a surveillance system based on a monocular and calibrated video camera that detects vehicles in an urban traffic scenario with dense traffic on multiple lanes and vehicles performing sharp turning maneuvers. UTS then tracks the vehicles using a 3D bounding box representation and a physically reasonable 3D motion model relying on an unscented Kalman filter based approach. Since UTS recovers positions, shape and motion information in a three-dimensional world coordinate system, it can be employed to recognize diverse traffic violations or to supply intelligent…
MINES ParisTech（巴黎高等矿业学院）；PSL（巴黎文理研究大学）；Valeo Driving Assistance Research Valeo.ai（法雷奥驾驶辅助研究法雷奥人工智能）
Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal behavior policy from its own experiments and not rule-based control methods. However, there is no RL algorithm yet capable of handling a task as difficult as urban driving. We present a novel technique, coined implicit affordances, to effectively leverage RL for urban driving thus including lane keeping, pedestrians and vehicles avoidance, and traffic light detection. To our knowledge we are the first to present a successful RL agent handling such a complex task especially regarding the traffic light detection. Furthermore, we have demons…
University of Freiburg（弗赖堡大学）；Woven by Toyota（丰田编织公司）；University of Technology Nuremberg（纽伦堡工业大学）
Lane graph estimation is an essential and highly challenging task in automated driving and HD map learning. Existing methods using either onboard or aerial imagery struggle with complex lane topologies, out-of-distribution scenarios, or significant occlusions in the image space. Moreover, merging overlapping lane graphs to obtain consistent large-scale graphs remains difficult. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel bottom-up approach to lane graph estimation from aerial imagery that aggregates multiple overlapping graphs into a single consistent graph. Due to its modular design, our…
Contextual Robotics Institute（情境机器人研究所）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
This work introduces a new approach for joint detection of centerlines based on image data by localizing the features jointly in 2D and 3D. In contrast to existing work that focuses on detection of visual cues, we explore feature extraction methods that are directly amenable to the urban driving task. To develop and evaluate our approach, a large urban driving dataset dubbed AV Breadcrumbs is automatically labeled by leveraging vector map representations and projective geometry to annotate over 900,000 images. Our results demonstrate potential for dynamic scene modeling across various urban dr…
Establishing Reality-Virtuality Interconnections in Urban Digital Twins for Superior Intelligent Road Inspection and Simulation
College of Electronics & Information Engineering, Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Autonomous Systems, and Frontiers Science Center for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China（电子与信息工程学院，上海智能自主系统研究院，智能自主系统国家重点实验室，智能自主系统前沿科学中心，同济大学，上海）
Autonomous vehicles require knowledge of the surrounding road layout, which can be predicted by state-of-the-art CNNs. This work addresses the current lack of data for determining lane instances, which are needed for various driving manoeuvres. The main issue is the time-consuming manual labelling process, typically applied per image. We notice that driving the car is itself a form of annotation. Therefore, we propose a semi-automated method that allows for efficient labelling of image sequences by utilising an estimated road plane in 3D based on where the car has driven and projecting labels …
Lane detection is an essential part of the perception sub-architecture of any automated driving (AD) or advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). When focusing on low-cost, large scale products for automated driving, model-driven approaches for the detection of lane markings have proven good performance. More recently, data-driven approaches have been proposed that target the drivable area / freespace mainly in inner-city applications. Focus of these approaches is less on lane-based driving due to the fact that the lane concept does not fully apply in unstructured, residential inner-city envir…
Deep learning has led to great progress in the detection of mobile (i.e. movement-capable) objects in urban driving scenes in recent years. Supervised approaches typically require the annotation of large training sets; there has thus been great interest in leveraging weakly, semi- or self-supervised methods to avoid this, with much success. Whilst weakly and semi-supervised methods require some annotation, self-supervised methods have used cues such as motion to relieve the need for annotation altogether. However, a complete absence of annotation typically degrades their performance, and ambig…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Semantic segmentation is a critical method in the field of autonomous driving. When performing semantic image segmentation, a wider field of view (FoV) helps to obtain more information about the surrounding environment, making automatic driving safer and more reliable, which could be offered by fisheye cameras. However, large public fisheye datasets are not available, and the fisheye images captured by the fisheye camera with large FoV comes with large distortion, so commonly-used semantic segmentation model cannot be directly utilized. In this paper, a seven degrees of freedom (DoF) augmentat…
School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学机械工程学院）
The urban intersection is a typically dynamic and complex scenario for intelligent vehicles, which exists a variety of driving behaviors and traffic participants. Accurately modelling the driver behavior at the intersection is essential for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Previous researches mainly focus on using attention mechanism to model the degree of correlation. In this research, a canonical correlation analysis (CCA)-based framework is proposed. The value of canonical correlation is used for feature selection. Gaussian mixture model and Gaussian process regression are applied …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）
In urban cities, visual information on and along roadways is likely to distract drivers and lead to missing traffic signs and other accident-prone (AP) features. To avoid accidents due to missing these visual cues, this paper proposes a visual notification of AP-features to drivers based on real-time images obtained via dashcam. For this purpose, Google Street View images around accident hotspots (areas of dense accident occurrence) identified by a real-accident dataset are used to train a novel attention module to classify a given urban scene into an accident hotspot or a non-hotspot (area of…
