Lin Liu

Ziying Song, Guoxing Zhang, Lin Liu et al.

Multi-modal 3D object detectors are dedicated to exploring secure and reliable perception systems for autonomous driving (AD).Although achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on clean benchmark datasets, they tend to overlook the complexity and harsh conditions of real-world environments. With the emergence of visual foundation models (VFMs), opportunities and challenges are presented for improving the robustness and generalization of multi-modal 3D object detection in AD. Therefore, we propose RoboFusion, a robust framework that leverages VFMs like SAM to tackle out-of-distribution (OOD) noise scenarios. We first adapt the original SAM for AD scenarios named SAM-AD. To align SAM or SAM-AD with multi-modal methods, we then introduce AD-FPN for upsampling the image features extracted by SAM. We employ wavelet decomposition to denoise the depth-guided images for further noise reduction and weather interference. At last, we employ self-attention mechanisms to adaptively reweight the fused features, enhancing informative features while suppressing excess noise. In summary, RoboFusion significantly reduces noise by leveraging the generalization and robustness of VFMs, thereby enhancing the resilience of multi-modal 3D object detection. Consequently, RoboFusion achieves SOTA performance in noisy scenarios, as demonstrated by the KITTI-C and nuScenes-C benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/adept-thu/RoboFusion.

Guoxin Zhang, Ziying Song, Lin Liu et al.

Multimodal 3D object detection has garnered considerable interest in autonomous driving. However, multimodal detectors suffer from dimension mismatches that derive from fusing 3D points with 2D pixels coarsely, which leads to sub-optimal fusion performance. In this paper, we propose a multimodal framework FGU3R to tackle the issue mentioned above via unified 3D representation and fine-grained fusion, which consists of two important components. First, we propose an efficient feature extractor for raw and pseudo points, termed Pseudo-Raw Convolution (PRConv), which modulates multimodal features synchronously and aggregates the features from different types of points on key points based on multimodal interaction. Second, a Cross-Attention Adaptive Fusion (CAAF) is designed to fuse homogeneous 3D RoI (Region of Interest) features adaptively via a cross-attention variant in a fine-grained manner. Together they make fine-grained fusion on unified 3D representation. The experiments conducted on the KITTI and nuScenes show the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Ziying Song, Lin Liu, Feiyang Jia et al.

In the realm of modern autonomous driving, the perception system is indispensable for accurately assessing the state of the surrounding environment, thereby enabling informed prediction and planning. The key step to this system is related to 3D object detection that utilizes vehicle-mounted sensors such as LiDAR and cameras to identify the size, the category, and the location of nearby objects. Despite the surge in 3D object detection methods aimed at enhancing detection precision and efficiency, there is a gap in the literature that systematically examines their resilience against environmental variations, noise, and weather changes. This study emphasizes the importance of robustness, alongside accuracy and latency, in evaluating perception systems under practical scenarios. Our work presents an extensive survey of camera-only, LiDAR-only, and multi-modal 3D object detection algorithms, thoroughly evaluating their trade-off between accuracy, latency, and robustness, particularly on datasets like KITTI-C and nuScenes-C to ensure fair comparisons. Among these, multi-modal 3D detection approaches exhibit superior robustness, and a novel taxonomy is introduced to reorganize the literature for enhanced clarity. This survey aims to offer a more practical perspective on the current capabilities and the constraints of 3D object detection algorithms in real-world applications, thus steering future research towards robustness-centric advancements.