Bandwidth-adaptive Cloud-Assisted 360-Degree 3D Perception for Autonomous Vehicles
This work addresses latency and accuracy issues in autonomous driving perception, offering an incremental improvement through adaptive cloud offloading for better real-time performance.
The paper tackles the challenge of real-time 360-degree 3D perception for autonomous vehicles by proposing a cloud-assisted approach that dynamically splits computation between the vehicle and cloud, reducing end-to-end latency by 72% compared to onboard solutions and improving accuracy by up to 20% under varying network conditions.
A key challenge for autonomous driving lies in maintaining real-time situational awareness regarding surrounding obstacles under strict latency constraints. The high processing requirements coupled with limited onboard computational resources can cause delay issues, particularly in complex urban settings. To address this, we propose leveraging Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to partially offload processing to the cloud, where compute resources are abundant, thus reducing overall latency. Our approach utilizes transformer-based models to fuse multi-camera sensor data into a comprehensive Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation, enabling accurate 360-degree 3D object detection. The computation is dynamically split between the vehicle and the cloud based on the number of layers processed locally and the quantization level of the features. To further reduce network load, we apply feature vector clipping and compression prior to transmission. In a real-world experimental evaluation, our hybrid strategy achieved a 72 \% reduction in end-to-end latency compared to a traditional onboard solution. To adapt to fluctuating network conditions, we introduce a dynamic optimization algorithm that selects the split point and quantization level to maximize detection accuracy while satisfying real-time latency constraints. Trace-based evaluation under realistic bandwidth variability shows that this adaptive approach improves accuracy by up to 20 \% over static parameterization with the same latency performance.