Xiaomeng Chu

Guoliang You, Xiaomeng Chu, Yifan Duan et al.

When planning for autonomous driving, it is crucial to consider essential traffic elements such as lanes, intersections, traffic regulations, and dynamic agents. However, they are often overlooked by the traditional end-to-end planning methods, likely leading to inefficiencies and non-compliance with traffic regulations. In this work, we endeavor to integrate the perception of these elements into the planning task. To this end, we propose Perception Helps Planning (PHP), a novel framework that reconciles lane-level planning with perception. This integration ensures that planning is inherently aligned with traffic constraints, thus facilitating safe and efficient driving. Specifically, PHP focuses on both edges of a lane for planning and perception purposes, taking into consideration the 3D positions of both lane edges and attributes for lane intersections, lane directions, lane occupancy, and planning. In the algorithmic design, the process begins with the transformer encoding multi-camera images to extract the above features and predicting lane-level perception results. Next, the hierarchical feature early fusion module refines the features for predicting planning attributes. Finally, the double-edge interpreter utilizes a late-fusion process specifically designed to integrate lane-level perception and planning information, culminating in the generation of vehicle control signals. Experiments on three Carla benchmarks show significant improvements in driving score of 27.20%, 33.47%, and 15.54% over existing algorithms, respectively, achieving the state-of-the-art performance, with the system operating up to 22.57 FPS.

Mingxia Zhan, Li Zhang, Yingjie Wang et al.

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) aims to infer per-pixel depth from a single RGB image. While diffusion models have advanced MDE with impressive generalization, they often exhibit limitations in accurately reconstructing far-range regions. This difficulty arises from two key challenges. First, the implicit multi-scale processing in standard spatial-domain models can be insufficient for preserving the fine-grained, high-frequency details crucial for distant structures. Second, the intrinsic long-tail distribution of depth data imposes a strong training bias towards more prevalent near-range regions. To address these, we propose VistaDepth, a novel diffusion framework designed for balanced and accurate depth perception. We introduce two key innovations. First, the Latent Frequency Modulation (LFM) module enhances the model's ability to represent high-frequency details. It operates by having a lightweight network predict a dynamic, content-aware spectral filter to refine latent features, thereby improving the reconstruction of distant structures. Second, our BiasMap mechanism introduces an adaptive reweighting of the diffusion loss strategically scaled across diffusion timesteps. It further aligns the supervision with the progressive denoising process, establishing a more consistent learning signal. As a result, it mitigates data bias without sacrificing training stability. Experiments show that VistaDepth achieves state-of-the-art performance for diffusion-based MDE, particularly excelling in reconstructing detailed and accurate depth in far-range regions.