Rethinking the Role of Infrastructure in Collaborative Perception
This addresses the need for better infrastructure integration in autonomous vehicle perception systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing collaborative perception frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating infrastructure's role in collaborative perception by quantitatively analyzing how infrastructure data affects 3D detection accuracy, finding that it improves accuracy by up to 10.30% and that infrastructure-centric approaches boost accuracy by up to 46.47% with better noise robustness.
Collaborative Perception (CP) is a process in which an ego agent receives and fuses sensor information from surrounding vehicles and infrastructure to enhance its perception capability. To evaluate the need for infrastructure equipped with sensors, extensive and quantitative analysis of the role of infrastructure data in CP is crucial, yet remains underexplored. To address this gap, we first quantitatively assess the importance of infrastructure data in existing vehicle-centric CP, where the ego agent is a vehicle. Furthermore, we compare vehicle-centric CP with infra-centric CP, where the ego agent is now the infrastructure, to evaluate the effectiveness of each approach. Our results demonstrate that incorporating infrastructure data improves 3D detection accuracy by up to 10.30%, and infra-centric CP shows enhanced noise robustness and increases accuracy by up to 46.47% compared with vehicle-centric CP.