Matthew J. Barth

Zhengwei Bai, Guoyuan Wu, Matthew J. Barth et al.

Utilizing the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the computer vision community is now witnessing an unprecedented evolution in all kinds of perception tasks, particularly in object detection. Based on multiple spatially separated perception nodes, Cooperative Perception (CP) has emerged to significantly advance the perception of automated driving. However, current cooperative object detection methods mainly focus on ego-vehicle efficiency without considering the practical issues of system-wide costs. In this paper, we introduce VINet, a unified deep learning-based CP network for scalable, lightweight, and heterogeneous cooperative 3D object detection. VINet is the first CP method designed from the standpoint of large-scale system-level implementation and can be divided into three main phases: 1) Global Pre-Processing and Lightweight Feature Extraction which prepare the data into global style and extract features for cooperation in a lightweight manner; 2) Two-Stream Fusion which fuses the features from scalable and heterogeneous perception nodes; and 3) Central Feature Backbone and 3D Detection Head which further process the fused features and generate cooperative detection results. An open-source data experimental platform is designed and developed for CP dataset acquisition and model evaluation. The experimental analysis shows that VINet can reduce 84% system-level computational cost and 94% system-level communication cost while improving the 3D detection accuracy.

Zhengwei Bai, Guoyuan Wu, Matthew J. Barth et al.

Perceiving the environment is one of the most fundamental keys to enabling Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA), which is regarded as the revolutionary solution to addressing the safety, mobility, and sustainability issues of contemporary transportation systems. Although an unprecedented evolution is now happening in the area of computer vision for object perception, state-of-the-art perception methods are still struggling with sophisticated real-world traffic environments due to the inevitably physical occlusion and limited receptive field of single-vehicle systems. Based on multiple spatially separated perception nodes, Cooperative Perception (CP) is born to unlock the bottleneck of perception for driving automation. In this paper, we comprehensively review and analyze the research progress on CP and, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to propose a unified CP framework. Architectures and taxonomy of CP systems based on different types of sensors are reviewed to show a high-level description of the workflow and different structures for CP systems. Node structure, sensor modality, and fusion schemes are reviewed and analyzed with comprehensive literature to provide detailed explanations of specific methods. A Hierarchical CP framework is proposed, followed by a review of existing Datasets and Simulators to sketch an overall landscape of CP. Discussion highlights the current opportunities, open challenges, and anticipated future trends.

Zhengwei Bai, Guoyuan Wu, Matthew J. Barth et al.

Cooperative perception (CP) is attracting increasing attention and is regarded as the core foundation to support cooperative driving automation, a potential key solution to addressing the safety, mobility, and sustainability issues of contemporary transportation systems. However, current research on CP is still at the beginning stages where a systematic problem formulation of CP is still missing, acting as the essential guideline of the system design of a CP system under real-world situations. In this paper, we formulate a universal CP system into an optimization problem and a mobile-edge-cloud framework called Cooperverse. This system addresses CP in a mixed connectivity and automation environment. A Dynamic Feature Sharing (DFS) methodology is introduced to support this CP system under certain constraints and a Random Priority Filtering (RPF) method is proposed to conduct DFS with high performance. Experiments have been conducted based on a high-fidelity CP platform, and the results show that the Cooperverse framework is effective for dynamic node engagement and the proposed DFS methodology can improve system CP performance by 14.5% and the RPF method can reduce the communication cost for mobile nodes by 90% with only 1.7% drop for average precision.

Zhengwei Bai, Guoyuan Wu, Xuewei Qi et al.

Object detection plays a fundamental role in enabling Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA), which is regarded as the revolutionary solution to addressing safety, mobility, and sustainability issues of contemporary transportation systems. Although current computer vision technologies could provide satisfactory object detection results in occlusion-free scenarios, the perception performance of onboard sensors could be inevitably limited by the range and occlusion. Owing to flexible position and pose for sensor installation, infrastructure-based detection and tracking systems can enhance the perception capability for connected vehicles and thus quickly become one of the most popular research topics. In this paper, we review the research progress for infrastructure-based object detection and tracking systems. Architectures of roadside perception systems based on different types of sensors are reviewed to show a high-level description of the workflows for infrastructure-based perception systems. Roadside sensors and different perception methodologies are reviewed and analyzed with detailed literature to provide a low-level explanation for specific methods followed by Datasets and Simulators to draw an overall landscape of infrastructure-based object detection and tracking methods. Discussions are conducted to point out current opportunities, open problems, and anticipated future trends.

Zhengwei Bai, Guoyuan Wu, Xuewei Qi et al.

Endowed with automation and connectivity, Connected and Automated Vehicles are meant to be a revolutionary promoter for Cooperative Driving Automation. Nevertheless, CAVs need high-fidelity perception information on their surroundings, which is available but costly to collect from various onboard sensors as well as vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. Therefore, authentic perception information based on high-fidelity sensors via a cost-effective platform is crucial for enabling CDA-related research, e.g., cooperative decision-making or control. Most state-of-the-art traffic simulation studies for CAVs rely on situation-awareness information by directly calling on intrinsic attributes of the objects, which impedes the reliability and fidelity of the assessment of CDA algorithms. In this study, a \textit{Cyber Mobility Mirror (CMM)} Co-Simulation Platform is designed for enabling CDA by providing authentic perception information. The \textit{CMM} Co-Simulation Platform can emulate the real world with a high-fidelity sensor perception system and a cyber world with a real-time rebuilding system acting as a "\textit{Mirror}" of the real-world environment. Concretely, the real-world simulator is mainly in charge of simulating the traffic environment, sensors, as well as the authentic perception process. The mirror-world simulator is responsible for rebuilding objects and providing their information as intrinsic attributes of the simulator to support the development and evaluation of CDA algorithms. To illustrate the functionality of the proposed co-simulation platform, a roadside LiDAR-based vehicle perception system for enabling CDA is prototyped as a study case. Specific traffic environments and CDA tasks are designed for experiments whose results are demonstrated and analyzed to show the performance of the platform.