HD map reconstruction is crucial for autonomous driving. LiDAR-based methods are limited due to expensive sensors and time-consuming computation. Camera-based methods usually need to perform road segmentation and view transformation separately, which often causes distortion and missing content. To push the limits of the technology, we present a novel framework that reconstructs a local map formed by road layout and vehicle occupancy in the bird's-eye view given a front-view monocular image only. We propose a front-to-top view projection (FTVP) module, which takes the constraint of cycle consistency between views into account and makes full use of their correlation to strengthen the view transformation and scene understanding. In addition, we also apply multi-scale FTVP modules to propagate the rich spatial information of low-level features to mitigate spatial deviation of the predicted object location. Experiments on public benchmarks show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in the tasks of road layout estimation, vehicle occupancy estimation, and multi-class semantic estimation. For multi-class semantic estimation, in particular, our model outperforms all competitors by a large margin. Furthermore, our model runs at 25 FPS on a single GPU, which is efficient and applicable for real-time panorama HD map reconstruction.
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…
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 …
BEVSpread: Spread Voxel Pooling for Bird's-Eye-View Representation in Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Polytechnic Institute, Zhejiang University Baidu（浙江大学百度理工学院）；Zhejiang – Singapore Innovation and AI Joint Research Lab（浙新创新与人工智能联合研究实验室）
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…
BEVHeight: A Robust Framework for Vision-based Roadside 3D Object Detection
State Key Laboratory of Automotive Safety and Energy, Tsinghua University（清华大学汽车安全与节能国家重点实验室）；Autonomous Driving Lab, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团自动驾驶实验室）；Shenzhen Campus, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）；Center for Machine Learning Research, Peking University（北京大学机器学习研究中心）
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…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Explore Academy of JD.com（京东探索研究院）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Given an image with multiple people, our goal is to directly regress the pose and shape of all the people as well as their relative depth. Inferring the depth of a person in an image, however, is fundamentally ambiguous without knowing their height. This is particularly problematic when the scene contains people of very different sizes, e.g. from infants to adults. To solve this, we need several things. First, we develop a novel method to infer the poses and depth of multiple people in a single image. While previous work that estimates multiple people does so by reasoning in the image plane, o…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Multi-sensor fusion-based road segmentation plays an important role in the intelligent driving system since it provides a drivable area. The existing mainstream fusion method is mainly to feature fusion in the image space domain which causes the perspective compression of the road and damages the performance of the distant road. Considering the bird's eye views(BEV) of the LiDAR remains the space structure in horizontal plane, this paper proposes a bidirectional fusion network(BiFNet) to fuse the image and BEV of the point cloud. The network consists of two modules: 1) Dense space transformati…
School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学计算与增强智能学院）；Department of Computer Science and Physics, Rider University（莱德大学计算机科学与物理系）
University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；Federal University of Rio Grande（里奥格兰德联邦大学）；University of Technology Nuremberg（纽伦堡工业大学）
Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) semantic maps have become an essential component of automated driving pipelines due to the rich representation they provide for decision-making tasks. However, existing approaches for generating these maps still follow a fully supervised training paradigm and hence rely on large amounts of annotated BEV data. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing the first self-supervised approach for generating a BEV semantic map using a single monocular image from the frontal view (FV). During training, we overcome the need for BEV ground truth annotations by leveraging …
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Collaborative Safety Research Center at the Toyota Motor North America Research & Development（丰田汽车北美研发中心协作安全研究中心）
This paper proposes a method to extract the position and pose of vehicles in the 3D world from a single traffic camera. Most previous monocular 3D vehicle detection algorithms focused on cameras on vehicles from the perspective of a driver, and assumed known intrinsic and extrinsic calibration. On the contrary, this paper focuses on the same task using uncalibrated monocular traffic cameras. We observe that the homography between the road plane and the image plane is essential to 3D vehicle detection and the data synthesis for this task, and the homography can be estimated without the camera i…
Estimating a semantically segmented bird's-eye-view (BEV) map from a single image has become a popular technique for autonomous control and navigation. However, they show an increase in localization error with distance from the camera. While such an increase in error is entirely expected - localization is harder at distance - much of the drop in performance can be attributed to the cues used by current texture-based models, in particular, they make heavy use of object-ground intersections (such as shadows), which become increasingly sparse and uncertain for distant objects. In this work, we ad…
FedBEVT: Federated Learning Bird's Eye View Perception Transformer in Road Traffic Systems
Fraunhofer Institute for Transportation and Infrastructure Systems IVI（弗劳恩霍夫交通与基础设施系统研究所IVI）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt（英戈尔施塔特应用技术大学）
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）
Concurrent perception datasets for autonomous driving are mainly limited to frontal view with sensors mounted on the vehicle. None of them is designed for the overlooked roadside perception tasks. On the other hand, the data captured from roadside cameras have strengths over frontal-view data, which is believed to facilitate a safer and more intelligent autonomous driving system. To accelerate the progress of roadside perception, we present the first high-diversity challenging Roadside Perception 3D dataset- Rope3D from a novel view. The dataset consists of 50k images and over 1.5M 3D objects …
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…
Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；China University of Geosciences（中国地质大学）
Structure from motion (SFM) and ground plane homography estimation are critical to autonomous driving and other robotics applications. Recently, much progress has been made in using deep neural networks for SFM and homography estimation respectively. However, directly applying existing methods for ground plane homography estimation may fail because the road is often a small part of the scene. Besides, the performances of deep SFM approaches are still inferior to traditional methods. In this paper, we propose a method that learns to solve both problems in an end-to-end manner, improving perform…
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…
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…
3D lane detection which plays a crucial role in vehicle routing, has recently been a rapidly developing topic in autonomous driving. Previous works struggle with practicality due to their complicated spatial transformations and inflexible representations of 3D lanes. Faced with the issues, our work proposes an efficient and robust monocular 3D lane detection called BEV-LaneDet with three main contributions. First, we introduce the Virtual Camera that unifies the in/extrinsic parameters of cameras mounted on different vehicles to guarantee the consistency of the spatial relationship among camer…
Robotics Research Center, KCIS, IIIT Hyderabad（印度海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所 KCIS 机器人研究中心）；Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (MILA), Universite de Montreal（蒙特利尔大学蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）
Accurate localization of other traffic participants is a vital task in autonomous driving systems. State-of-the-art systems employ a combination of sensing modalities such as RGB cameras and LiDARs for localizing traffic participants, but most such demonstrations have been confined to plain roads. We demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first results for monocular object localization and shape estimation on surfaces that do not share the same plane with the moving monocular camera. We approximate road surfaces by local planar patches and use semantic cues from vehicles in the scene t…
VQ-Map: Bird's-Eye-View Map Layout Estimation in Tokenized Discrete Space via Vector Quantization
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；People AI, Inc（People AI公司）；Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, HKISI, CAS（中国科学院香港智能研究所人工智能与机器人中心）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）
BEV$^2$PR: BEV-Enhanced Visual Place Recognition with Structural Cues
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), CASIA（中国科学院自动化研究所多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University（浙江大学智能系统与控制研究所）
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…
Low-cost autonomous agents including autonomous driving vehicles chiefly adopt monocular 3D object detection to perceive surrounding environment. This paper studies 3D intermediate representation methods which generate intermediate 3D features for subsequent tasks. For example, the 3D features can be taken as input for not only detection, but also end-to-end prediction and/or planning that require a bird's-eye-view feature representation. In the study, we found that in generating 3D representation previous methods do not maintain the consistency between the objects' implicit poses in the laten…
In this paper, we introduce a deep encoder-decoder network, named SalsaNet, for efficient semantic segmentation of 3D LiDAR point clouds. SalsaNet segments the road, i.e. drivable free-space, and vehicles in the scene by employing the Bird-Eye-View (BEV) image projection of the point cloud. To overcome the lack of annotated point cloud data, in particular for the road segments, we introduce an auto-labeling process which transfers automatically generated labels from the camera to LiDAR. We also explore the role of imagelike projection of LiDAR data in semantic segmentation by comparing BEV wit…
Monocular 3D object detection is a challenging task in the self-driving and computer vision community. As a common practice, most previous works use manually annotated 3D box labels, where the annotating process is expensive. In this paper, we find that the precisely and carefully annotated labels may be unnecessary in monocular 3D detection, which is an interesting and counterintuitive finding. Using rough labels that are randomly disturbed, the detector can achieve very close accuracy compared to the one using the ground-truth labels. We delve into this underlying mechanism and then empirica…
