Lantao Li

Lantao Li, Chen Sun

Multi-agent multi-lidar sensor fusion between connected vehicles for cooperative perception has recently been recognized as the best technique for minimizing the blind zone of individual vehicular perception systems and further enhancing the overall safety of autonomous driving systems. This technique relies heavily on the reliability and availability of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. In practical sensor fusion application scenarios, the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) issue causes blind zones for not only the perception system but also V2X direct communication. To counteract underlying communication issues, we introduce an abstract perception matrix matching method for quick sensor fusion matching procedures and mobility-height hybrid relay determination procedures, proactively improving the efficiency and performance of V2X communication to serve the upper layer application fusion requirements. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution, we design a new simulation framework to consider autonomous driving, sensor fusion and V2X communication in general, paving the way for end-to-end performance evaluation and further solution derivation.

Lantao Li, Kang Yang, Wenqi Zhang et al.

Cooperative perception enhances autonomous driving by leveraging Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication for multi-agent sensor fusion. However, most existing methods rely on single-modal data sharing, limiting fusion performance, particularly in heterogeneous sensor settings involving both LiDAR and cameras across vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). To address this, we propose Radian Glue Attention (RG-Attn), a lightweight and generalizable cross-modal fusion module that unifies intra-agent and inter-agent fusion via transformation-based coordinate alignment and a unified sampling/inversion strategy. RG-Attn efficiently aligns features through a radian-based attention constraint, operating column-wise on geometrically consistent regions to reduce overhead and preserve spatial coherence, thereby enabling accurate and robust fusion. Building upon RG-Attn, we propose three cooperative architectures. The first, Paint-To-Puzzle (PTP), prioritizes communication efficiency but assumes all agents have LiDAR, optionally paired with cameras. The second, Co-Sketching-Co-Coloring (CoS-CoCo), offers maximal flexibility, supporting any sensor setup (e.g., LiDAR-only, camera-only, or both) and enabling strong cross-modal generalization for real-world deployment. The third, Pyramid-RG-Attn Fusion (PRGAF), aims for peak detection accuracy with the highest computational overhead. Extensive evaluations on simulated and real-world datasets show our framework delivers state-of-the-art detection accuracy with high flexibility and efficiency. GitHub Link: https://github.com/LantaoLi/RG-Attn

Lantao Li, Kang Yang, Rui Song et al.

Cooperative perception enabled by Vehicle-to-Everything communication has shown great promise in enhancing situational awareness for autonomous vehicles and other mobile robotic platforms. Despite recent advances in perception backbones and multi-agent fusion, real-world deployments remain challenged by hard detection cases, exemplified by partial detections and noise accumulation which limit downstream detection accuracy. This work presents Diffusion on Reinforced Cooperative Perception (DRCP), a real-time deployable framework designed to address aforementioned issues in dynamic driving environments. DRCP integrates two key components: (1) Precise-Pyramid-Cross-Modality-Cross-Agent, a cross-modal cooperative perception module that leverages camera-intrinsic-aware angular partitioning for attention-based fusion and adaptive convolution to better exploit external features; and (2) Mask-Diffusion-Mask-Aggregation, a novel lightweight diffusion-based refinement module that encourages robustness against feature perturbations and aligns bird's-eye-view features closer to the task-optimal manifold. The proposed system achieves real-time performance on mobile platforms while significantly improving robustness under challenging conditions. Code will be released in late 2025.