Surround View fisheye cameras are commonly deployed in automated driving for 360° near-field sensing around the vehicle. This work presents a multi-task visual perception network on unrectified fisheye images to enable the vehicle to sense its surrounding environment. It consists of six primary tasks necessary for an autonomous driving system: depth estimation, visual odometry, semantic segmentation, motion segmentation, object detection, and lens soiling detection. We demonstrate that the jointly trained model performs better than the respective single task versions. Our multi-task model has a shared encoder providing a significant computational advantage and has synergized decoders where tasks support each other. We propose a novel camera geometry based adaptation mechanism to encode the fisheye distortion model both at training and inference. This was crucial to enable training on the WoodScape dataset, comprised of data from different parts of the world collected by 12 different cameras mounted on three different cars with different intrinsics and viewpoints. Given that bounding boxes is not a good representation for distorted fisheye images, we also extend object detection to use a polygon with non-uniformly sampled vertices. We additionally evaluate our model on standard automotive datasets, namely KITTI and Cityscapes. We obtain the state-of-the-art results on KITTI for depth estimation and pose estimation tasks and competitive performance on the other tasks. We perform extensive ablation studies on various architecture choices and task weighting methodologies. A short video at https://youtu.be/xbSjZ5OfPes provides qualitative results.
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）
We propose a novel and pragmatic framework for traffic scene perception with roadside cameras. The proposed framework covers a full-stack of roadside perception pipeline for infrastructure-assisted autonomous driving, including object detection, object localization, object tracking, and multi-camera information fusion. Unlike previous vision-based perception frameworks rely upon depth offset or 3D annotation at training, we adopt a modular decoupling design and introduce a landmark-based 3D localization method, where the detection and localization can be well decoupled so that the model can be…
Semi-SMD: Semi-Supervised Metric Depth Estimation via Surrounding Cameras for Autonomous Driving
Robotics and Autonomous Systems Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（机器人与自主系统方向，香港科学与技术大学（广州））；Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（电子与计算机工程系，香港科学与技术大学）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
A vast literature shows that the learning-based visual perception model is sensitive to adversarial noises, but few works consider the robustness of robotic perception models under widely-existing camera motion perturbations. To this end, we study the robustness of the visual perception model under camera motion perturbations to investigate the influence of camera motion on robotic perception. Specifically, we propose a motion smoothing technique for arbitrary image classification models, whose robustness under camera motion perturbations could be certified. The proposed robustness certificati…
Valeo DAR Kronach（法雷奥DAR克罗纳赫）；TU Ilmenau（伊尔梅瑙工业大学）；TU Braunschweig（布伦瑞克工业大学）；Valeo Vision Systems（法雷奥视觉系统）
A 360° perception of scene geometry is essential for automated driving, notably for parking and urban driving scenarios. Typically, it is achieved using surround-view fisheye cameras, focusing on the near-field area around the vehicle. The majority of current depth estimation approaches focus on employing just a single camera, which cannot be straightforwardly generalized to multiple cameras. The depth estimation model must be tested on a variety of cameras equipped to millions of cars with varying camera geometries. Even within a single car, intrinsics vary due to manufacturing tolerances. De…
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…
Event cameras capture visual information with a high temporal resolution and a wide dynamic range. This enables capturing visual information at fine time granularities (e.g., microseconds) in rapidly changing environments. This makes event cameras highly useful for high-speed robotics tasks involving rapid motion, such as high-speed perception, object tracking, and control. However, convolutional neural network inference on event camera streams cannot currently perform real-time inference at the high speeds at which event cameras operate - current CNN inference times are typically closer in or…
Zongmu Technology（纵目科技）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Technical University of Braunschweig（布伦瑞克工业大学）
Surround-view fisheye perception under valet parking scenes is fundamental and crucial in autonomous driving. Environmental conditions in parking lots perform differently from the common public datasets, such as imperfect light and opacity, which substantially impacts on perception performance. Most existing networks based on public datasets may generalize suboptimal results on these valet parking scenes, also affected by the fisheye distortion. In this article, we introduce a new large-scale fisheye dataset called Fisheye Parking Dataset(FPD) to promote the research in dealing with diverse re…
Institute of Mathematical and Computer Sciences (ICMC)（数学与计算机科学学院（ICMC））
One of the main paths towards the reduction of traffic accidents is the increase in vehicle safety through driver assistance systems or even systems with a complete level of autonomy. In these types of systems, tasks such as obstacle detection and segmentation, especially the Deep Learning-based ones, play a fundamental role in scene understanding for correct and safe navigation. Besides that, the wide variety of sensors in vehicles nowadays provides a rich set of alternatives for improvement in the robustness of perception in challenging situations, such as navigation under lighting and weath…
EventFly: Event Camera Perception from Ground to the Sky
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR（新加坡科研局信息通信研究所）；IPAL, CNRS IRL 2955（法国国家科学研究中心IPAL国际研究实验室）；CerCo, CNRS UMR 5549, Université Toulouse III（法国国家科学研究中心CerCo实验室，图卢兹第三大学）
We present an approach for estimating a mobile robot's pose w.r.t. the allocentric coordinates of a network of static cameras using multi-view RGB images. The images are processed online, locally on smart edge sensors by deep neural networks to detect the robot and estimate 2D keypoints defined at distinctive positions of the 3D robot model. Robot keypoint detections are synchronized and fused on a central backend, where the robot's pose is estimated via multi-view minimization of reprojection errors. Through the pose estimation from external cameras, the robot's localization can be initialize…
Modern autonomous vehicles rely heavily on mechanical LiDARs for perception. Current perception methods generally require 360° point clouds, collected sequentially as the LiDAR scans the azimuth and acquires consecutive wedge-shaped slices. The acquisition latency of a full scan (~ 100ms) may lead to outdated perception which is detrimental to safe operation. Recent streaming perception works proposed directly processing LiDAR slices and compensating for the narrow field of view (FOV) of a slice by reusing features from preceding slices. These works, however, are all based on a single modality…
RCBEVDet++: Toward High-accuracy Radar-Camera Fusion 3D Perception Network
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学信息与通信工程学院）
Environment perception is crucial for autonomous vehicle (AV) safety. Most existing AV perception algorithms have not studied the surrounding environment complexity and failed to include the environment complexity parameter. This paper proposes a novel attention-based neural network model to predict the complexity level of the surrounding driving environment. The proposed model takes naturalistic driving videos and corresponding vehicle dynamics parameters as input. It consists of a Yolo-v3 object detection algorithm, a heat map generation algorithm, CNN-based feature extractors, and attention…
DSO National Laboratories（DSO国家实验室）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；MPI-IS and University of Tübingen（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所和图宾根大学）；Microsoft, Switzerland（微软瑞士）；Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden（瑞典查尔姆斯理工大学）
Project AutoVision aims to develop localization and 3D scene perception capabilities for a self-driving vehicle. Such capabilities will enable autonomous navigation in urban and rural environments, in day and night, and with cameras as the only exteroceptive sensors. The sensor suite employs many cameras for both 360-degree coverage and accurate multi-view stereo; the use of low-cost cameras keeps the cost of this sensor suite to a minimum. In addition, the project seeks to extend the operating envelope to include GNSS-less conditions which are typical for environments with tall buildings, fol…
University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；DSO National Laboratories（新加坡国防科技研究院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨技术大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Microsoft（微软）
Cameras are a crucial exteroceptive sensor for self-driving cars as they are low-cost and small, provide appearance information about the environment, and work in various weather conditions. They can be used for multiple purposes such as visual navigation and obstacle detection. We can use a surround multi-camera system to cover the full 360-degree field-of-view around the car. In this way, we avoid blind spots which can otherwise lead to accidents. To minimize the number of cameras needed for surround perception, we utilize fisheye cameras. Consequently, standard vision pipelines for 3D mappi…
Valeo India（法雷奥印度）；Valeo R&D Prague（法雷奥布拉格研发中心）；Valeo Visions Systems（法雷奥视觉系统）；Valeo DAR Bobigny（法雷奥博比尼先进研发中心）；Valeo DAR Kronach（法雷奥克罗纳赫先进研发中心）
Automotive cameras, particularly surround-view cameras, tend to get soiled by mud, water, snow, etc. For higher levels of autonomous driving, it is necessary to have a soiling detection algorithm which will trigger an automatic cleaning system. Localized detection of soiling in an image is necessary to control the cleaning system. It is also necessary to enable partial functionality in unsoiled areas while reducing confidence in soiled areas. Although this can be solved using a semantic segmentation task, we explore a more efficient solution targeting deployment in low power embedded system. W…
For human drivers, having rear and side-view mirrors is vital for safe driving. They deliver a more complete view of what is happening around the car. Human drivers also heavily exploit their mental map for navigation. Nonetheless, several methods have been published that learn driving models with only a front-facing camera and without a route planner. This lack of information renders the self-driving task quite intractable. We investigate the problem in a more realistic setting, which consists of a surround-view camera system with eight cameras, a route planner, and a CAN bus reader. In parti…
Zongmu Technology（纵目科技）；University of Victoria（维多利亚大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）
The vehicle re-identification (ReID) plays a critical role in the perception system of autonomous driving, which attracts more and more attention in recent years. However, to our best knowledge, there is no existing complete solution for the surround-view system mounted on the vehicle. In this paper, we argue two main challenges in above scenario: i) In single camera view, it is difficult to recognize the same vehicle from the past image frames due to the fisheye distortion, occlusion, truncation, etc. ii) In multi-camera view, the appearance of the same vehicle varies greatly from different c…
The Blackbird unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) dataset is a large-scale, aggressive indoor flight dataset collected using a custom-built quadrotor platform for use in evaluation of agile perception.Inspired by the potential of future high-speed fully-autonomous drone racing, the Blackbird dataset contains over 10 hours of flight data from 168 flights over 17 flight trajectories and 5 environments at velocities up to $7.0ms^-1$. Each flight includes sensor data from 120Hz stereo and downward-facing photorealistic virtual cameras, 100Hz IMU, $\sim190Hz$ motor speed sensors, and 360Hz millimeter-acc…
Surround-view cameras are a primary sensor for automated driving, used for near-field perception. It is one of the most commonly used sensors in commercial vehicles primarily used for parking visualization and automated parking. Four fisheye cameras with a 190° field of view cover the 360° around the vehicle. Due to its high radial distortion, the standard algorithms do not extend easily. Previously, we released the first public fisheye surround-view dataset named WoodScape. In this work, we release a synthetic version of the surround-view dataset, covering many of its weaknesses and extending…
The development of automatic perception systems and techniques for bio-inspired flapping-wing robots is severely hampered by the high technical complexity of these platforms and the installation of onboard sensors and electronics. Besides, flapping-wing robot perception suffers from high vibration levels and abrupt movements during flight, which cause motion blur and strong changes in lighting conditions. This paper presents a perception dataset for bird-scale flapping-wing robots as a tool to help alleviate the aforementioned problems. The presented data include measurements from onboard sens…
Zongmu Technology（纵目科技）；Technical University of Braunschweig（布伦瑞克工业大学）
Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) is a critical component of the autonomous driving perception system, and research in this area has accelerated in recent years. However, there is yet no perfect solution to the vehicle re-identification issue associated with the car's surround-view camera system. Our analysis identifies two significant issues in the aforementioned scenario: i) It is difficult to identify the same vehicle in many picture frames due to the unique construction of the fisheye camera. ii) The appearance of the same vehicle when seen via the surround vision system's several cameras …
Radar-Camera Fusion for Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review
University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）；Institute of Deep Perception Technology, JITRI（江苏省产业技术研究院深度感知技术研究所）；XJTLU-JITRI Academy of Industrial Technology（西交利物浦大学-江苏省产业技术研究院工业技术学院）
The increasing popularity of quadrotors has given rise to a class of predominantly vision-driven vehicles. This paper addresses the problem of perception-aware time optimal path parametrization for quadrotors. Although many different choices of perceptual modalities are available, the low weight and power budgets of quadrotor systems makes a camera ideal for on-board navigation and estimation algorithms. However, this does come with a set of challenges. The limited field of view of the camera can restrict the visibility of salient regions in the environment, which dictates the necessity to con…
This paper proposes an efficient multi-camera to Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) view transformation method for 3D perception, dubbed MatrixVT. Existing view transformers either suffer from poor transformation efficiency or rely on device-specific operators, hindering the broad application of BEV models. In contrast, our method generates BEV features efficiently with only convolutions and matrix multiplications (MatMul). Specifically, we propose describing the BEV feature as the MatMul of image feature and a sparse Feature Transporting Matrix (FTM). A Prime Extraction module is then introduced to compre…
The formation of eyes led to the big bang of evolution. The dynamics changed from a primitive organism waiting for the food to come into contact for eating food being sought after by visual sensors. The human eye is one of the most sophisticated developments of evolution, but it still has defects. Humans have evolved a biological perception algorithm capable of driving cars, operating machinery, piloting aircraft, and navigating ships over millions of years. Automating these capabilities for computers is critical for various applications, including self-driving cars, augmented reality, and arc…
Cameras are an essential part of sensor suite in autonomous driving. Surround-view cameras are directly exposed to external environment and are vulnerable to get soiled. Cameras have a much higher degradation in performance due to soiling compared to other sensors. Thus it is critical to accurately detect soiling on the cameras, particularly for higher levels of autonomous driving. We created a new dataset having multiple types of soiling namely opaque and transparent. It will be released publicly as part of our WoodScape dataset \cite{yogamani2019woodscape} to encourage further research. We d…
Look, Zoom, Understand: The Robotic Eyeball for Embodied Perception
School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
Over the last decade, robotic perception algorithms have significantly benefited from the rapid advances in deep learning (DL). Indeed, a significant amount of the autonomy stack of different commercial and research platforms relies on DL for situational awareness, especially vision sensors. This work explores the potential of general-purpose DL perception algorithms, specifically detection and segmentation neural networks, for processing image-like outputs of advanced lidar sensors. Rather than processing the three-dimensional point cloud data, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first…
WD-DETR: Wavelet Denoising-Enhanced Real-Time Object Detection Transformer for Robot Perception with Event Cameras
School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, Beihang University（航空科学与工程学院，北京航空航天大学）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute of Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；Institute of Unmanned System, Beihang University（无人系统研究院，北京航空航天大学）；Tianmushan Laboratory Xixi Octagon City（天门山实验室西溪八角城）
针对事件相机密集表示噪声导致漏检的问题，提出 WD-DETR，通过小波去噪骨干、Transformer 检测头和 DRCB 混合编码器提升精度，并在 Jetson Orin NX 上实现约35 FPS实时推理。
Zongmu Technology（纵目科技）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
The 3D visual perception for vehicles with the surround-view fisheye camera system is a critical and challenging task for low-cost urban autonomous driving. While existing monocular 3D object detection methods perform not well enough on the fisheye images for mass production, partly due to the lack of 3D datasets of such images. In this paper, we manage to overcome and avoid the difficulty of acquiring the large scale of accurate 3D labeled truth data, by breaking down the 3D object detection task into some sub-tasks, such as vehicle's contact point detection, type classification, re-identific…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
