Jingyu Song

Jingyu Song, Xudong Chen, Liupei Lu et al.

High-definition (HD) maps provide environmental information for autonomous driving systems and are essential for safe planning. While existing methods with single-frame input achieve impressive performance for online vectorized HD map construction, they still struggle with complex scenarios and occlusions. We propose MemFusionMap, a novel temporal fusion model with enhanced temporal reasoning capabilities for online HD map construction. Specifically, we contribute a working memory fusion module that improves the model's memory capacity to reason across a history of frames. We also design a novel temporal overlap heatmap to explicitly inform the model about the temporal overlap information and vehicle trajectory in the Bird's Eye View space. By integrating these two designs, MemFusionMap significantly outperforms existing methods while also maintaining a versatile design for scalability. We conduct extensive evaluation on open-source benchmarks and demonstrate a maximum improvement of 5.4% in mAP over state-of-the-art methods. The project page for MemFusionMap is https://song-jingyu.github.io/MemFusionMap

Lingjun Zhao, Jingyu Song, Katherine A. Skinner

In the field of 3D object detection for autonomous driving, LiDAR-Camera (LC) fusion is the top-performing sensor configuration. Still, LiDAR is relatively high cost, which hinders adoption of this technology for consumer automobiles. Alternatively, camera and radar are commonly deployed on vehicles already on the road today, but performance of Camera-Radar (CR) fusion falls behind LC fusion. In this work, we propose Camera-Radar Knowledge Distillation (CRKD) to bridge the performance gap between LC and CR detectors with a novel cross-modality KD framework. We use the Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation as the shared feature space to enable effective knowledge distillation. To accommodate the unique cross-modality KD path, we propose four distillation losses to help the student learn crucial features from the teacher model. We present extensive evaluations on the nuScenes dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CRKD framework. The project page for CRKD is https://song-jingyu.github.io/CRKD.

Jingyu Song, Lingjun Zhao, Katherine A. Skinner

We propose LiRaFusion to tackle LiDAR-radar fusion for 3D object detection to fill the performance gap of existing LiDAR-radar detectors. To improve the feature extraction capabilities from these two modalities, we design an early fusion module for joint voxel feature encoding, and a middle fusion module to adaptively fuse feature maps via a gated network. We perform extensive evaluation on nuScenes to demonstrate that LiRaFusion leverages the complementary information of LiDAR and radar effectively and achieves notable improvement over existing methods.