Kun Zhao

Kun Zhao, Qian Gao, Siyuan Hao et al.

Due to their ability to offer more comprehensive information than data from a single view, multi-view (multi-source, multi-modal, multi-perspective, etc.) data are being used more frequently in remote sensing tasks. However, as the number of views grows, the issue of data quality becomes more apparent, limiting the potential benefits of multi-view data. Although recent deep neural network (DNN) based models can learn the weight of data adaptively, a lack of research on explicitly quantifying the data quality of each view when fusing them renders these models inexplicable, performing unsatisfactorily and inflexible in downstream remote sensing tasks. To fill this gap, in this paper, evidential deep learning is introduced to the task of aerial-ground dual-view remote sensing scene classification to model the credibility of each view. Specifically, the theory of evidence is used to calculate an uncertainty value which describes the decision-making risk of each view. Based on this uncertainty, a novel decision-level fusion strategy is proposed to ensure that the view with lower risk obtains more weight, making the classification more credible. On two well-known, publicly available datasets of aerial-ground dual-view remote sensing images, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its effectiveness. The code and datasets of this article are available at the following address: https://github.com/gaopiaoliang/Evidential.

Yongkun Liu, Kesong Ni, Yuhan Zhang et al.

Multi-Label Remote Sensing Image Classification (MLRSIC) has received increasing research interest. Taking the cooccurrence relationship of multiple labels as additional information helps to improve the performance of this task. Current methods focus on using it to constrain the final feature output of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). On the one hand, these methods do not make full use of label correlation to form feature representation. On the other hand, they increase the label noise sensitivity of the system, resulting in poor robustness. In this paper, a novel method called Semantic Interleaving Global Channel Attention (SIGNA) is proposed for MLRSIC. First, the label co-occurrence graph is obtained according to the statistical information of the data set. The label co-occurrence graph is used as the input of the Graph Neural Network (GNN) to generate optimal feature representations. Then, the semantic features and visual features are interleaved, to guide the feature expression of the image from the original feature space to the semantic feature space with embedded label relations. SIGNA triggers global attention of feature maps channels in a new semantic feature space to extract more important visual features. Multihead SIGNA based feature adaptive weighting networks are proposed to act on any layer of CNN in a plug-and-play manner. For remote sensing images, better classification performance can be achieved by inserting CNN into the shallow layer. We conduct extensive experimental comparisons on three data sets: UCM data set, AID data set, and DFC15 data set. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SIGNA achieves superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. It is worth mentioning that the codes of this paper will be open to the community for reproducibility research. Our codes are available at https://github.com/kyle-one/SIGNA.

Maximilian Schäfer, Kun Zhao, Anton Kummert

The prediction of road users' future motion is a critical task in supporting advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). It plays an even more crucial role for autonomous driving (AD) in enabling the planning and execution of safe driving maneuvers. Based on our previous work, Context-Aware Scene Prediction Network (CASPNet), an improved system, CASPNet++, is proposed. In this work, we focus on further enhancing the interaction modeling and scene understanding to support the joint prediction of all road users in a scene using spatiotemporal grids to model future occupancy. Moreover, an instance-based output head is introduced to provide multi-modal trajectories for agents of interest. In extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, we demonstrate the scalability of CASPNet++ in utilizing and fusing diverse environmental input sources such as HD maps, Radar detection, and Lidar segmentation. Tested on the urban-focused prediction dataset nuScenes, CASPNet++ reaches state-of-the-art performance. The model has been deployed in a testing vehicle, running in real-time with moderate computational resources.

Harsh Yadav, Maximilian Schaefer, Kun Zhao et al.

Motion prediction plays an important role in autonomous driving. This study presents LMFormer, a lane-aware transformer network for trajectory prediction tasks. In contrast to previous studies, our work provides a simple mechanism to dynamically prioritize the lanes and shows that such a mechanism introduces explainability into the learning behavior of the network. Additionally, LMFormer uses the lane connection information at intersections, lane merges, and lane splits, in order to learn long-range dependency in lane structure. Moreover, we also address the issue of refining the predicted trajectories and propose an efficient method for iterative refinement through stacked transformer layers. For benchmarking, we evaluate LMFormer on the nuScenes dataset and demonstrate that it achieves SOTA performance across multiple metrics. Furthermore, the Deep Scenario dataset is used to not only illustrate cross-dataset network performance but also the unification capabilities of LMFormer to train on multiple datasets and achieve better performance.

Maximilian Schäfer, Kun Zhao, Markus Bühren et al.

Predicting the future motion of surrounding road users is a crucial and challenging task for autonomous driving (AD) and various advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Planning a safe future trajectory heavily depends on understanding the traffic scene and anticipating its dynamics. The challenges do not only lie in understanding the complex driving scenarios but also the numerous possible interactions among road users and environments, which are practically not feasible for explicit modeling. In this work, we tackle the above challenges by jointly learning and predicting the motion of all road users in a scene, using a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) based architecture. Moreover, by exploiting grid-based input and output data structures, the computational cost is independent of the number of road users and multi-modal predictions become inherent properties of our proposed method. Evaluation on the nuScenes dataset shows that our approach reaches state-of-the-art results in the prediction benchmark.

Benedikt Mersch, Thomas Höllen, Kun Zhao et al.

The ability to predict the future movements of other vehicles is a subconscious and effortless skill for humans and key to safe autonomous driving. Therefore, trajectory prediction for autonomous cars has gained a lot of attention in recent years. It is, however, still a hard task to achieve human-level performance. Interdependencies between vehicle behaviors and the multimodal nature of future intentions in a dynamic and complex driving environment render trajectory prediction a challenging problem. In this work, we propose a new, data-driven approach for predicting the motion of vehicles in a road environment. The model allows for inferring future intentions from the past interaction among vehicles in highway driving scenarios. Using our neighborhood-based data representation, the proposed system jointly exploits correlations in the spatial and temporal domain using convolutional neural networks. Our system considers multiple possible maneuver intentions and their corresponding motion and predicts the trajectory for five seconds into the future. We implemented our approach and evaluated it on two highway datasets taken in different countries and are able to achieve a competitive prediction performance.