Cooperative Perception with Learning-Based V2V communications
Addresses communication reliability for cooperative perception in autonomous driving, with incremental improvements to fusion methods and compression.
This work analyzes cooperative perception performance under communication channel impairments in autonomous driving, finding that intermediate fusion is more robust than early/late fusion at SNR > 0 dB, and proposing a late fusion scheme with autoencoder compression that outperforms conventional methods while balancing accuracy and bandwidth.
Cooperative perception has been widely used in autonomous driving to alleviate the inherent limitation of single automated vehicle perception. To enable cooperation, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication plays an indispensable role. This work analyzes the performance of cooperative perception accounting for communications channel impairments. Different fusion methods and channel impairments are evaluated. A new late fusion scheme is proposed to leverage the robustness of intermediate features. In order to compress the data size incurred by cooperation, a convolution neural network-based autoencoder is adopted. Numerical results demonstrate that intermediate fusion is more robust to channel impairments than early fusion and late fusion, when the SNR is greater than 0 dB. Also, the proposed fusion scheme outperforms the conventional late fusion using detection outputs, and autoencoder provides a good compromise between detection accuracy and bandwidth usage.