Shitao Chen

Jiawei Fu, Yanqing Shen, Zhiqiang Jian et al.

Planning and prediction are two important modules of autonomous driving and have experienced tremendous advancement recently. Nevertheless, most existing methods regard planning and prediction as independent and ignore the correlation between them, leading to the lack of consideration for interaction and dynamic changes of traffic scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose InteractionNet, which leverages transformer to share global contextual reasoning among all traffic participants to capture interaction and interconnect planning and prediction to achieve joint. Besides, InteractionNet deploys another transformer to help the model pay extra attention to the perceived region containing critical or unseen vehicles. InteractionNet outperforms other baselines in several benchmarks, especially in terms of safety, which benefits from the joint consideration of planning and forecasting. The code will be available at https://github.com/fujiawei0724/InteractionNet.

Wenjie Gao, Jiawei Fu, Yanqing Shen et al.

High-definition (HD) maps play a crucial role in autonomous driving systems. Recent methods have attempted to construct HD maps in real-time using vehicle onboard sensors. Due to the inherent limitations of onboard sensors, which include sensitivity to detection range and susceptibility to occlusion by nearby vehicles, the performance of these methods significantly declines in complex scenarios and long-range detection tasks. In this paper, we explore a new perspective that boosts HD map construction through the use of satellite maps to complement onboard sensors. We initially generate the satellite map tiles for each sample in nuScenes and release a complementary dataset for further research. To enable better integration of satellite maps with existing methods, we propose a hierarchical fusion module, which includes feature-level fusion and BEV-level fusion. The feature-level fusion, composed of a mask generator and a masked cross-attention mechanism, is used to refine the features from onboard sensors. The BEV-level fusion mitigates the coordinate differences between features obtained from onboard sensors and satellite maps through an alignment module. The experimental results on the augmented nuScenes showcase the seamless integration of our module into three existing HD map construction methods. The satellite maps and our proposed module notably enhance their performance in both HD map semantic segmentation and instance detection tasks.

Yanqing Shen, Sanping Zhou, Jingwen Fu et al.

Visual place recognition (VPR) is usually considered as a specific image retrieval problem. Limited by existing training frameworks, most deep learning-based works cannot extract sufficiently stable global features from RGB images and rely on a time-consuming re-ranking step to exploit spatial structural information for better performance. In this paper, we propose StructVPR, a novel training architecture for VPR, to enhance structural knowledge in RGB global features and thus improve feature stability in a constantly changing environment. Specifically, StructVPR uses segmentation images as a more definitive source of structural knowledge input into a CNN network and applies knowledge distillation to avoid online segmentation and inference of seg-branch in testing. Considering that not all samples contain high-quality and helpful knowledge, and some even hurt the performance of distillation, we partition samples and weigh each sample's distillation loss to enhance the expected knowledge precisely. Finally, StructVPR achieves impressive performance on several benchmarks using only global retrieval and even outperforms many two-stage approaches by a large margin. After adding additional re-ranking, ours achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a low computational cost.

Zewei Lin, Yanqing Shen, Sanping Zhou et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel and effective Multi-Level Fusion network, named as MLF-DET, for high-performance cross-modal 3D object DETection, which integrates both the feature-level fusion and decision-level fusion to fully utilize the information in the image. For the feature-level fusion, we present the Multi-scale Voxel Image fusion (MVI) module, which densely aligns multi-scale voxel features with image features. For the decision-level fusion, we propose the lightweight Feature-cued Confidence Rectification (FCR) module which further exploits image semantics to rectify the confidence of detection candidates. Besides, we design an effective data augmentation strategy termed Occlusion-aware GT Sampling (OGS) to reserve more sampled objects in the training scenes, so as to reduce overfitting. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, on the extremely competitive KITTI car 3D object detection benchmark, our method reaches 82.89% moderate AP and achieves state-of-the-art performance without bells and whistles.

Shitao Chen, Haolin Zhang, Nanning Zheng

3D object detection based on LiDAR point cloud and prior anchor boxes is a critical technology for autonomous driving environment perception and understanding. Nevertheless, an overlooked practical issue in existing methods is the ambiguity in training sample allocation based on box Intersection over Union (IoU_box). This problem impedes further enhancements in the performance of anchor-based LiDAR 3D object detectors. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a new training sample selection method that utilizes point cloud distribution for anchor sample quality measurement, named Point Assisted Sample Selection (PASS). This method has undergone rigorous evaluation on two widely utilized datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the application of PASS elevates the average precision of anchor-based LiDAR 3D object detectors to a novel state-of-the-art, thereby proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The codes will be made available at https://github.com/XJTU-Haolin/Point_Assisted_Sample_Selection.

Lesong Tao, Yifei Wang, Haodong Jing et al.

Value factorization, a popular paradigm in MARL, faces significant theoretical and algorithmic bottlenecks: its tendency to converge to suboptimal solutions remains poorly understood and unsolved. Theoretically, existing analyses fail to explain this due to their primary focus on the optimal case. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel theoretical concept: the stable point, which characterizes the potential convergence of value factorization in general cases. Through an analysis of stable point distributions in existing methods, we reveal that non-optimal stable points are the primary cause of poor performance. However, algorithmically, making the optimal action the unique stable point is nearly infeasible. In contrast, iteratively filtering suboptimal actions by rendering them unstable emerges as a more practical approach for global optimality. Inspired by this, we propose a novel Multi-Round Value Factorization (MRVF) framework. Specifically, by measuring a non-negative payoff increment relative to the previously selected action, MRVF transforms inferior actions into unstable points, thereby driving each iteration toward a stable point with a superior action. Experiments on challenging benchmarks, including predator-prey tasks and StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC), validate our analysis of stable points and demonstrate the superiority of MRVF over state-of-the-art methods.

Yanqing Shen, Sanping Zhou, Jingwen Fu et al.

Visual place recognition is a challenging task for autonomous driving and robotics, which is usually considered as an image retrieval problem. A commonly used two-stage strategy involves global retrieval followed by re-ranking using patch-level descriptors. Most deep learning-based methods in an end-to-end manner cannot extract global features with sufficient semantic information from RGB images. In contrast, re-ranking can utilize more explicit structural and semantic information in one-to-one matching process, but it is time-consuming. To bridge the gap between global retrieval and re-ranking and achieve a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency, we propose StructVPR++, a framework that embeds structural and semantic knowledge into RGB global representations via segmentation-guided distillation. Our key innovation lies in decoupling label-specific features from global descriptors, enabling explicit semantic alignment between image pairs without requiring segmentation during deployment. Furthermore, we introduce a sample-wise weighted distillation strategy that prioritizes reliable training pairs while suppressing noisy ones. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that StructVPR++ surpasses state-of-the-art global methods by 5-23% in Recall@1 and even outperforms many two-stage approaches, achieving real-time efficiency with a single RGB input.

Ziyue Feng, Yu Chen, Shitao Chen et al.

Autonomous parking technology is a key concept within autonomous driving research. This paper will propose an imaginative autonomous parking algorithm to solve issues concerned with parking. The proposed algorithm consists of three parts: an imaginative model for anticipating results before parking, an improved rapid-exploring random tree (RRT) for planning a feasible trajectory from a given start point to a parking lot, and a path smoothing module for optimizing the efficiency of parking tasks. Our algorithm is based on a real kinematic vehicle model; which makes it more suitable for algorithm application on real autonomous cars. Furthermore, due to the introduction of the imagination mechanism, the processing speed of our algorithm is ten times faster than that of traditional methods, permitting the realization of real-time planning simultaneously. In order to evaluate the algorithm's effectiveness, we have compared our algorithm with traditional RRT, within three different parking scenarios. Ultimately, results show that our algorithm is more stable than traditional RRT and performs better in terms of efficiency and quality.

Tao Yang, Zhixiong Nan, He Zhang et al.

The trajectory prediction is significant for the decision-making of autonomous driving vehicles. In this paper, we propose a model to predict the trajectories of target agents around an autonomous vehicle. The main idea of our method is considering the history trajectories of the target agent and the influence of surrounding agents on the target agent. To this end, we encode the target agent history trajectories as an attention mask and construct a social map to encode the interactive relationship between the target agent and its surrounding agents. Given a trajectory sequence, the LSTM networks are firstly utilized to extract the features for all agents, based on which the attention mask and social map are formed. Then, the attention mask and social map are fused to get the fusion feature map, which is processed by the social convolution to obtain a fusion feature representation. Finally, this fusion feature is taken as the input of a variable-length LSTM to predict the trajectory of the target agent. We note that the variable-length LSTM enables our model to handle the case that the number of agents in the sensing scope is highly dynamic in traffic scenes. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we widely compare with several methods on a public dataset, achieving a 20% error decrease. In addition, the model satisfies the real-time requirement with the 32 fps.

Kai Yi, Zhiqiang Jian, Shitao Chen et al.

At present, the performance of deep neural network in general object detection is comparable to or even surpasses that of human beings. However, due to the limitations of deep learning itself, the small proportion of feature pixels, and the occurence of blur and occlusion, the detection of small objects in complex scenes is still an open question. But we can not deny that real-time and accurate object detection is fundamental to automatic perception and subsequent perception-based decision-making and planning tasks of autonomous driving. Considering the characteristics of small objects in autonomous driving scene, we proposed a novel method named KB-RANN, which based on domain knowledge, intuitive experience and feature attentive selection. It can focus on particular parts of image features, and then it tries to stress the importance of these features and strengthenes the learning parameters of them. Our comparative experiments on KITTI and COCO datasets show that our proposed method can achieve considerable results both in speed and accuracy, and can improve the effect of small object detection through self-selection of important features and continuous enhancement of proposed method, and deployed it in our self-developed autonomous driving car.

Shitao Chen, Songyi Zhang, Jinghao Shang et al.

Perception-driven approach and end-to-end system are two major vision-based frameworks for self-driving cars. However, it is difficult to introduce attention and historical information of autonomous driving process, which are the essential factors for achieving human-like driving into these two methods. In this paper, we propose a novel model for self-driving cars named brain-inspired cognitive model with attention (CMA). This model consists of three parts: a convolutional neural network for simulating human visual cortex, a cognitive map built to describe relationships between objects in complex traffic scene and a recurrent neural network that combines with the real-time updated cognitive map to implement attention mechanism and long-short term memory. The benefit of our model is that can accurately solve three tasks simultaneously:1) detection of the free space and boundaries of the current and adjacent lanes. 2)estimation of obstacle distance and vehicle attitude, and 3) learning of driving behavior and decision making from human driver. More significantly, the proposed model could accept external navigating instructions during an end-to-end driving process. For evaluation, we build a large-scale road-vehicle dataset which contains more than forty thousand labeled road images captured by three cameras on our self-driving car. Moreover, human driving activities and vehicle states are recorded in the meanwhile.