LiDAR-based 4D Occupancy Completion and Forecasting
This work addresses a crucial perception challenge for autonomous driving by integrating completion and forecasting into a cohesive framework, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of unifying scene completion and forecasting for autonomous vehicles by introducing the LiDAR-based Occupancy Completion and Forecasting (OCF) task, and it curates a large-scale dataset called OCFBench for evaluation.
Scene completion and forecasting are two popular perception problems in research for mobile agents like autonomous vehicles. Existing approaches treat the two problems in isolation, resulting in a separate perception of the two aspects. In this paper, we introduce a novel LiDAR perception task of Occupancy Completion and Forecasting (OCF) in the context of autonomous driving to unify these aspects into a cohesive framework. This task requires new algorithms to address three challenges altogether: (1) sparse-to-dense reconstruction, (2) partial-to-complete hallucination, and (3) 3D-to-4D prediction. To enable supervision and evaluation, we curate a large-scale dataset termed OCFBench from public autonomous driving datasets. We analyze the performance of closely related existing baseline models and our own ones on our dataset. We envision that this research will inspire and call for further investigation in this evolving and crucial area of 4D perception. Our code for data curation and baseline implementation is available at https://github.com/ai4ce/Occ4cast.