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 flow accurately but also improves tracking performance of both dynamic and static objects.
In this paper, we present BirdSLAM, a novel simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system for the challenging scenario of autonomous driving platforms equipped with only a monocular camera. BirdSLAM tackles challenges faced by other monocular SLAM systems (such as scale ambiguity in monocular reconstruction, dynamic object localization, and uncertainty in feature representation) by using an orthographic (bird's-eye) view as the configuration space in which localization and mapping are performed. By assuming only the height of the ego-camera above the ground, BirdSLAM leverages single-vie…
Ford Greenfield Labs（福特格林菲尔德实验室）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Ford AV LLC（福特自动驾驶有限责任公司）
We describe a light-weight, weather and lighting invariant, Semantic Bird's Eye View (S-BEV) signature for vision-based vehicle re-localization. A topological map of S-BEV signatures is created during the first traversal of the route, which are used for coarse localization in subsequent route traversal. A fine-grained localizer is then trained to output the global 3-DoF pose of the vehicle using its S-BEV and its coarse localization. We conduct experiments on vKITTI2 virtual dataset and show the potential of the S-BEV to be robust to weather and lighting. We also demonstrate results with 2 veh…
Driving requires interacting with road agents and predicting their future behaviour in order to navigate safely. We present FIERY: a probabilistic future prediction model in bird's-eye view from monocular cameras. Our model predicts future instance segmentation and motion of dynamic agents that can be transformed into non-parametric future trajectories. Our approach combines the perception, sensor fusion and prediction components of a traditional autonomous driving stack by estimating bird's-eye-view prediction directly from surround RGB monocular camera inputs. FIERY learns to model the inher…
Autonomous navigation requires scene understanding of the action-space to move or anticipate events. For planner agents moving on the ground plane, such as autonomous vehicles, this translates to scene understanding in the bird's-eye view (BEV). However, the onboard cameras of autonomous cars are customarily mounted horizontally for a better view of the surrounding. In this work, we study scene understanding in the form of online estimation of semantic BEV maps using the video input from a single onboard camera. We study three key aspects of this task, image-level understanding, BEV level unde…
On-board 3D object detection in autonomous vehicles often relies on geometry information captured by LiDAR devices. Albeit image features are typically preferred for detection, numerous approaches take only spatial data as input. Exploiting this information in inference usually involves the use of compact representations such as the Bird's Eye View (BEV) projection, which entails a loss of information and thus hinders the joint inference of all the parameters of the objects' 3D boxes. In this paper, we present a fully end-to-end 3D object detection framework that can infer oriented 3D boxes so…
Valeo Comfort and Driving Assistance（法雷奥舒适与驾驶辅助系统）
The ability to perform semantic segmentation in real-time capable applications with limited hardware is of great importance. One such application is the interpretation of the visual bird's-eye view, which requires the semantic segmentation of the four omnidirectional camera images. In this paper, we present an efficient semantic segmentation that sets new standards in terms of runtime and hardware requirements. Our two main contributions are the decrease of the runtime by parallelizing the ArgMax layer and the reduction of hardware requirements by applying the channel pruning method to the ENe…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Awareness of the road scene is an essential component for both autonomous vehicles and Advances Driver Assistance Systems and is gaining importance both for the academia and car companies. This paper presents a way to learn a semantic-aware transformation which maps detections from a dashboard camera view onto a broader bird's eye occupancy map of the scene. To this end, a huge synthetic dataset featuring 1M couples of frames, taken from both car dashboard and bird's eye view, has been collected and automatically annotated. A deep-network is then trained to warp detections from the first to th…
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…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science (CASIA)（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
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 predict…
DuoSpaceNet: Leveraging Both Bird's-Eye-View and Perspective View Representations for 3D Object Detection
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；University of Washington, Seattle（华盛顿大学西雅图分校）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
This work introduces a new preprocessing step for object detection applicable to UAV bird's eye view imagery, which we call Adaptive Resizing. By design, it helps alleviate the challenges coming with the vast variances in objects' scales, naturally inherent to UAV data sets. Furthermore, it improves inference speed by two to three times on average. We test this extensively on UAVDT, VisDrone, and on a new data set we captured ourselves and achieve consistent improvements while being considerably faster. Moreover, we show how to apply this method to generic UAV object detection tasks. Additiona…
Bird's-eye-view (BEV) is a powerful and widely adopted representation for road scenes that captures surrounding objects and their spatial locations, along with overall context in the scene. In this work, we focus on bird's eye semantic segmentation, a task that predicts pixel-wise semantic segmentation in BEV from side RGB images. This task is made possible by simulators such as Carla, which allow for cheap data collection, arbitrary camera placements, and supervision in ways otherwise not possible in the real world. There are two main challenges to this task: the view transformation from side…
Currently, detecting 3D objects in Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) is superior to other 3D detectors for autonomous driving and robotics. However, transforming image features into BEV necessitates special operators to conduct feature sampling. These operators are not supported on many edge devices, bringing extra obstacles when deploying detectors. To address this problem, we revisit the generation of BEV representation and propose detecting objects in perspective BEV -- a new BEV representation that does not require feature sampling. We demonstrate that perspective BEV features can likewise enjoy the b…
Recent works in autonomous driving have widely adopted the bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic map as an intermediate representation of the world. Online prediction of these BEV maps involves non-trivial operations such as multi-camera data extraction as well as fusion and projection into a common topview grid. This is usually done with error-prone geometric operations (e.g., homography or back-projection from monocular depth estimation) or expensive direct dense mapping between image pixels and pixels in BEV (e.g., with MLP or attention). In this work, we present 'LaRa', an efficient encoder-decod…
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…
Accurate environment perception is essential for automated driving. When using monocular cameras, the distance estimation of elements in the environment poses a major challenge. Distances can be more easily estimated when the camera perspective is transformed to a bird's eye view (BEV). For flat surfaces, Inverse Perspective Mapping (IPM) can accurately transform images to a BEV. Three-dimensional objects such as vehicles and vulnerable road users are distorted by this transformation making it difficult to estimate their position relative to the sensor. This paper describes a methodology to ob…
Hyper-V2X: Hypernetworks for Estimating Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty in Cooperative Bird's-Eye-View Semantic Segmentation
CARISSMA Institute for Electric, COnnected, and Secure Mobility (C-ECOS), Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt（CARISSMA电动、连接与安全移动研究所（C-ECOS）、因戈尔施塔特技术大学）；University of Applied Sciences Aschaffenburg（阿施发堡应用科学大学）
RoboBEV: Towards Robust Bird's Eye View Perception under Corruptions
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) maps have emerged as one of the most powerful representations for scene understanding due to their ability to provide rich spatial context while being easy to interpret and process. Such maps have found use in many real-world tasks that extensively rely on accurate scene segmentation as well as object instance identification in the BEV space for their operation. However, existing segmentation algorithms only predict the semantics in the BEV space, which limits their use in applications where the notion of object instances is also critical. In this work, we present the fir…
Cross-Dataset Experimental Study of Radar-Camera Fusion in Bird's-Eye View
Stellantis, Opel Automobile GmbH（斯泰兰蒂斯集团，欧宝汽车有限公司）；Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau（莱茵兰-普法尔茨凯泽斯劳滕-兰道工业大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence（德国人工智能研究中心）
BEVScope: Enhancing Self-Supervised Depth Estimation Leveraging Bird's-Eye-View in Dynamic Scenarios
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Autonomous navigation requires structured representation of the road network and instance-wise identification of the other traffic agents. Since the traffic scene is defined on the ground plane, this corresponds to scene understanding in the bird's-eye-view (BEV). However, the onboard cameras of autonomous cars are customarily mounted horizontally for a better view of the surrounding, making this task very challenging. In this work, we study the problem of extracting a directed graph representing the local road network in BEV coordinates, from a single onboard camera image. Moreover, we show t…
Self-Supervised Bird's Eye View Motion Prediction with Cross-Modality Signals
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
The bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation allows robust learning of multiple tasks for autonomous driving including road layout estimation and 3D object detection. However, contemporary methods for unified road layout estimation and 3D object detection rarely handle the class imbalance of the training dataset and multi-class learning to reduce the total number of networks required. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified model for road layout estimation and 3D object detection inspired by the transformer architecture and the CycleGAN learning framework. The proposed model deals with…
VGG, Dept. of Engineering Science（工程科学系视觉几何组）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Latent Logic（潜在逻辑公司）
The objective of this paper is to rectify any monocular image by computing a homography matrix that transforms it to a bird's eye (overhead) view. We make the following contributions: (i) we show that the homography matrix can be parameterised with only four parameters that specify the horizon line and the vertical vanishing point, or only two if the field of view or focal length is known; (ii) We introduce a novel representation for the geometry of a line or point (which can be at infinity) that is suitable for regression with a convolutional neural network (CNN); (iii) We introduce a large s…
LG Canada（LG加拿大）；Huawei Technologies Canada（华为技术加拿大）
We present a learning-based method to estimate the object bounding box from its 2D bird's-eye view (BEV) LiDAR points. Our method, entitled BoxNet, exploits a simple deep neural network that can efficiently handle unordered points. The method takes as input the 2D coordinates of all the points and the output is a vector consisting of both the box pose (position and orientation in LiDAR coordinate system) and its size (width and length). In order to deal with the angle discontinuity problem, we propose to estimate the double-angle sinusoidal values rather than the angle itself. We also predict …
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Vision-centric joint perception and prediction (PnP) has become an emerging trend in autonomous driving research. It predicts the future states of the traffic participants in the surrounding environment from raw RGB images. However, it is still a critical challenge to synchronize features obtained at multiple camera views and timestamps due to inevitable geometric distortions and further exploit those spatial-temporal features. To address this issue, we propose a temporal bird's-eye-view pyramid transformer (TBP-Former) for vision-centric PnP, which includes two novel designs. First, a pose-sy…
Detection of moving objects is a very important task in autonomous driving systems. After the perception phase, motion planning is typically performed in Bird's Eye View (BEV) space. This would require projection of objects detected on the image plane to top view BEV plane. Such a projection is prone to errors due to lack of depth information and noisy mapping in far away areas. CNNs can leverage the global context in the scene to project better. In this work, we explore end-to-end Moving Object Detection (MOD) on the BEV map directly using monocular images as input. To the best of our knowled…
Geo-ConvGRU: Geographically Masked Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit for Bird-Eye View Segmentation
School of Instrument Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT)（哈尔滨工业大学仪器科学与工程学院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Huawei inc.（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；School of Astronautics, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学宇航学院）
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories（三菱电机研究实验室）
The ability to reliably perceive the environmental states, particularly the existence of objects and their motion behavior, is crucial for autonomous driving. In this work, we propose an efficient deep model, called MotionNet, to jointly perform perception and motion prediction from 3D point clouds. MotionNet takes a sequence of LiDAR sweeps as input and outputs a bird's eye view (BEV) map, which encodes the object category and motion information in each grid cell. The backbone of MotionNet is a novel spatio-temporal pyramid network, which extracts deep spatial and temporal features in a hiera…
Accurate layout estimation is crucial for planning and navigation in robotics applications, such as self-driving. In this paper, we introduce the Stereo Bird's Eye ViewNetwork (SBEVNet), a novel supervised end-to-end framework for estimation of bird's eye view layout from a pair of stereo images. Although our network reuses some of the building blocks from the state-of-the-art deep learning networks for disparity estimation, we show that explicit depth estimation is neither sufficient nor necessary. Instead, the learning of a good internal bird's eye view feature representation is effective fo…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；DJI（大疆创新）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University（浙江大学上海高等研究院）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）
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 convention…
BEVTraj: Map-Free End-to-End Trajectory Prediction in Bird's-Eye View with Deformable Attention and Sparse Goal Proposals
Department of Automobile and IT Convergence, Kookmin University（汽车与IT融合系，韩国釜山大学）；Department of Automotive Engineering, Kookmin University（汽车工程系，韩国釜山大学）；Graduate School of Automobile and Mobility, Kookmin University（汽车与移动研究生院，韩国釜山大学）
Vision-Driven 2D Supervised Fine-Tuning Framework for Bird's Eye View Perception
School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与 Mobility学院）；State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学智能绿色车辆与交通全国重点实验室）
Hamilton Institute Maynooth University（汉密尔顿研究所梅努斯大学）；Valeo Vision Systems（法雷奥视觉系统公司）；Maynooth University（梅努斯大学）
Generating a detailed near-field perceptual model of the environment is an important and challenging problem in both self-driving vehicles and autonomous mobile robotics. A Bird Eye View (BEV) map, providing a panoptic representation, is a commonly used approach that provides a simplified 2D representation of the vehicle surroundings with accurate semantic level segmentation for many downstream tasks. Current state-of-the art approaches to generate BEV-maps employ a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) backbone to create feature-maps which are passed through a spatial transformer to project the …
