Alexander Blumberg

Richard Schwarzkopf, Fabian Immel, Alexander Blumberg et al.

Existing autonomous driving datasets have enabled major progress, but fall short in sensor fidelity, map completeness, or geographic diversity. We present KITScenes Multimodal, a European dataset built around high-fidelity sensors and maps. Our fully synchronized sensor suite combines high-resolution global-shutter cameras, long-range lidar beyond 400m, 4D imaging radar, and redundant GNSS/INS localization. Our HD maps are, to our knowledge, the most complete of any sensor dataset, validated through autonomous driving trials on open-source software. For the first time in a public dataset, all driving-relevant traffic elements, such as traffic lights, are mapped in 3D to a reprojection-accurate level with full topological connectivity. Recorded in cities with irregular street layouts and mixed traffic modes, our dataset complements existing datasets by broadening the available geographic diversity. We also introduce four benchmarks, each advancing spatial learning for embodied AI: online HD map construction, long-range depth estimation, novel view synthesis, and end-to-end driving. Project page: https://kitscenes.com/

Jonas Merkert, Alexander Blumberg, Jan-Hendrik Pauls et al.

Autonomous vehicles rely on map information to understand the world around them. However, the creation and maintenance of offline high-definition (HD) maps remains costly. A more scalable alternative lies in online HD map construction, which only requires map annotations at training time. To further reduce the need for annotating vast training labels, self-supervised training provides an alternative. This work focuses on improving the latent birds-eye-view (BEV) feature grid representation within a vectorized online HD map construction model by enforcing geospatial consistency between overlapping BEV feature grids as part of a contrastive loss function. To ensure geospatial overlap for contrastive pairs, we introduce an approach to analyze the overlap between traversals within a given dataset and generate subsidiary dataset splits following adjustable multi-traversal requirements. We train the same model supervised using a reduced set of single-traversal labeled data and self-supervised on a broader unlabeled set of data following our multi-traversal requirements, effectively implementing a semi-supervised approach. Our approach outperforms the supervised baseline across the board, both quantitatively in terms of the downstream tasks vectorized map perception performance and qualitatively in terms of segmentation in the principal component analysis (PCA) visualization of the BEV feature space.

Alexander Blumberg, Jonas Merkert, Richard Fehler et al.

High-definition (HD) maps are crucial for autonomous vehicles, but their creation and maintenance is very costly. This motivates the idea of online HD map construction. To provide a continuous large-scale stream of training data, existing HD maps can be used as labels for onboard sensor data from consumer vehicle fleets. However, compared to current, well curated HD map perception datasets, this fleet data suffers from localization errors, resulting in distorted map labels. We introduce three kinds of localization errors, Ramp, Gaussian, and Perlin noise, to examine their influence on generated map labels. We train a variant of MapTRv2, a state-of-the-art online HD map construction model, on the Argoverse 2 dataset with various levels of localization errors and assess the degradation of model performance. Since localization errors affect distant labels more severely, but are also less significant to driving performance, we introduce a distance-based map construction metric. Our experiments reveal that localization noise affects the model performance significantly. We demonstrate that errors in heading angle exert a more substantial influence than position errors, as angle errors result in a greater distortion of labels as distance to the vehicle increases. Furthermore, we can demonstrate that the model benefits from non-distorted ground truth (GT) data and that the performance decreases more than linearly with the increase in noisy data. Our study additionally provides a qualitative evaluation of the extent to which localization errors influence the construction of HD maps.