Runsheng Xu

Bird's-Eye View (BEV) Perception has received increasing attention in recent years as it provides a concise and unified spatial representation across views and benefits a diverse set of downstream driving applications. At the same time, data-driven simulation for autonomous driving has been a focal point of recent research but with few approaches that are both fully data-driven and controllable. Instead of using perception data from real-life scenarios, an ideal model for simulation would generate realistic street-view images that align with a given HD map and traffic layout, a task that is critical for visualizing complex traffic scenarios and developing robust perception models for autonomous driving. In this paper, we propose BEVGen, a conditional generative model that synthesizes a set of realistic and spatially consistent surrounding images that match the BEV layout of a traffic scenario. BEVGen incorporates a novel cross-view transformation with spatial attention design which learns the relationship between cameras and map views to ensure their consistency. We evaluate the proposed model on the challenging NuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets. After training, BEVGen can accurately render road and lane lines, as well as generate traffic scenes with diverse different weather conditions and times of day.

The rapid advancements in sensing techniques, networking, and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in recent years have brought autonomous driving vehicles closer to common use in vehicular transportation. One of the fundamental components to enable autonomous driving functionalities are High-Definition (HD) maps – a type of map that carries highly accurate and much richer information than conventional maps. The creation and use of HD maps rely on advances in multiple disciplines, such as computer vision/object perception, geographic information systems, sensing, simultaneous localization and mapping, machine learning, etc. To date, several survey papers have been published describing the literature related to HD maps and their use in specialized contexts. In this survey, we aim to provide (1) a comprehensive overview of the issues and solutions related to HD maps and their use without attachment to a particular context; (2) a detailed coverage of the important domain knowledge of HD map furniture, from acquisition techniques and extraction approaches, through HD map–related datasets, to furniture quality assessment metrics, for the purpose of providing a comprehensive understanding of the entire workflow of HD map furniture generation, as well as its use.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful new family of deep generative models with record-breaking performance in many applications, including image synthesis, video generation, and molecule design. In this survey, we provide an overview of the rapidly expanding body of work on diffusion models, categorizing the research into three key areas: efficient sampling, improved likelihood estimation, and handling data with special structures. We also discuss the potential for combining diffusion models with other generative models for enhanced results. We further review the wide-ranging applications of diffusion models in fields spanning from computer vision, natural language processing, temporal data modeling, to interdisciplinary applications in other scientific disciplines. This survey aims to provide a contextualized, in-depth look at the state of diffusion models, identifying the key areas of focus and pointing to potential areas for further exploration. Github: https://github.com/YangLing0818/Diffusion-Models-Papers-Survey-Taxonomy

Bird's eye view (BEV) perception is becoming increasingly important in the field of autonomous driving. It uses multi-view camera data to learn a transformer model that directly projects the perception of the road environment onto the BEV perspective. However, training a transformer model often requires a large amount of data, and as camera data for road traffic are often private, they are typically not shared. Federated learning offers a solution that enables clients to collaborate and train models without exchanging data but model parameters. In this paper, we introduce FedBEVT, a federated transformer learning approach for BEV perception. In order to address two common data heterogeneity issues in FedBEVT: (i) diverse sensor poses, and (ii) varying sensor numbers in perception systems, we propose two approaches - Federated Learning with Camera-Attentive Personalization (FedCaP) and Adaptive Multi-Camera Masking (AMCM), respectively. To evaluate our method in real-world settings, we create a dataset consisting of four typical federated use cases. Our findings suggest that FedBEVT outperforms the baseline approaches in all four use cases, demonstrating the potential of our approach for improving BEV perception in autonomous driving.

Advances in Single-vehicle intelligence of automated driving has encountered great challenges because of limited capabilities in perception and interaction with complex trafic environments. Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA) has been considered a pivotal solution to next-generation automated driv-ing and smart transportation. Though CDA has attracted much attention from both academia and industry, exploration of its potential is still in its infancy. In industry, companies tend to build their in-house data collection pipeline and research tools to tailor their needs and protect intellectual properties. Reinventing the wheels, however, wastes resources and limits the generalizability of the developed approaches since no standardized benchmarks exist. On the other hand, in academia, due to the absence of real-world trafic data and computation resources, researchers often investigate CDA topics in simplified and mostly simulated environments, restricting the possibility of scaling the research outputs to real-world scenarios. Therefore, there is an urgent need to establish an open-source ecosystem (OSE) to address the demands of different communities for CDA research, particularly in the early exploratory research stages, and provide the bridge to ensure an integrated development and testing pipeline that diverse communities can share. In this paper, we introduce the OpenCDA research ecosystem, a unified OSE integrated with a model zoo, a suite of driving simulators at various resolutions, large-scale real-world and simulated datasets, complete devel-opment toolkits for benchmark training/testing, and a scenario database/generator. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of OpenCDA OSE through example use cases, including cooperative 3D LiDAR detection, cooperative merge, cooperative camera-based map prediction, and adversarial scenario generation.

Recent research has found that navigation systems usually assume that all roads are equally safe, directing drivers to dangerous routes, which led to catastrophic consequences. To address this problem, this paper aims to begin the process of adding road safety awareness to navigation systems. To do so, we first created a definition for road safety that navigation systems can easily understand by adapting well-established safety standards from transportation studies. Based on this road safety definition, we then developed a machine learning-based road safety classifier that predicts the safety level for road segments using a diverse feature set constructed only from publicly available geographic data. Evaluations in four different countries show that our road safety classifier achieves satisfactory performance. Finally, we discuss the factors to consider when extending our road safety classifier to other regions and potential new safety designs enabled by our road safety predictions.