NanoMVG: USV-Centric Low-Power Multi-Task Visual Grounding based on Prompt-Guided Camera and 4D mmWave Radar

Recently, visual grounding and multi-sensors setting have been incorporated into perception system for terrestrial autonomous driving systems and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), yet the high complexity of modern learning-based visual grounding model using multi-sensors prevents such model to be deployed on USVs in the real-life. To this end, we design a low-power multi-task model named NanoMVG for waterway embodied perception, guiding both camera and 4D millimeter-wave radar to locate specific object(s) through natural language. NanoMVG can perform both box-level and mask-level visual grounding tasks simultaneously. Compared to other visual grounding models, NanoMVG achieves highly competitive performance on the WaterVG dataset, particularly in harsh environments and boasts ultra-low power consumption for long endurance.

Talk2Radar: Bridging Natural Language with 4D mmWave Radar for 3D Referring Expression Comprehension

Embodied perception is essential for intelligent vehicles and robots, enabling more natural interaction and task execution. However, these advancements currently embrace vision level, rarely focusing on using 3D modeling sensors, which limits the full understanding of surrounding objects with multi-granular characteristics. Recently, as a promising automotive sensor with affordable cost, 4D Millimeter-Wave radar provides denser point clouds than conventional radar and perceives both semantic and physical characteristics of objects, thus enhancing the reliability of perception system. To foster the development of natural language-driven context understanding in radar scenes for 3D grounding, we construct the first dataset, Talk2Radar, which bridges these two modalities for 3D Referring Expression Comprehension. Talk2Radar contains 8,682 referring prompt samples with 20,558 referred objects. Moreover, we propose a novel model, T-RadarNet for 3D REC upon point clouds, achieving state-of-the-art performances on Talk2Radar dataset compared with counterparts, where Deformable-FPN and Gated Graph Fusion are meticulously designed for efficient point cloud feature modeling and cross-modal fusion between radar and text features, respectively. Further, comprehensive experiments are conducted to give a deep insight into radar-based 3D REC. We release our project at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Talk2Radar.

ProbRadarM3F: mmWave Radar based Human Skeletal Pose Estimation with Probability Map Guided Multi-Format Feature Fusion

Millimetre wave (mmWave) radar is a non-intrusive privacy and relatively convenient and inexpensive device, which has been demonstrated to be applicable in place of RGB cameras in human indoor pose estimation tasks. However, mmWave radar relies on the collection of reflected signals from the target, and the radar signals containing information is difficult to be fully applied. This has been a long-standing hindrance to the improvement of pose estimation accuracy. To address this major challenge, this paper introduces a probability map guided multi-format feature fusion model, ProbRadarM3F. This is a novel radar feature extraction framework using a traditional FFT method in parallel with a probability map based positional encoding method. ProbRadarM3F fuses the traditional heatmap features and the positional features, then effectively achieves the estimation of 14 keypoints of the human body. Experimental evaluation on the HuPR dataset proves the effectiveness of the model proposed in this paper, outperforming other methods experimented on this dataset with an AP of 69.9 %. The emphasis of our study is focusing on the position information that is not exploited before in radar singal. This provides direction to investigate other potential non-redundant information from mmWave rader.

On the Federated Learning Framework for Cooperative Perception

Cooperative perception is essential to enhance the efficiency and safety of future transportation systems, requiring extensive data sharing among vehicles on the road, which raises significant privacy concerns. Federated learning offers a promising solution by enabling data privacy-preserving collaborative enhancements in perception, decision-making, and planning among connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). However, federated learning is impeded by significant challenges arising from data heterogeneity across diverse clients, potentially diminishing model accuracy and prolonging convergence periods. This study introduces a specialized federated learning framework for CP, termed the federated dynamic weighted aggregation (FedDWA) algorithm, facilitated by dynamic adjusting loss (DALoss) function. This framework employs dynamic client weighting to direct model convergence and integrates a novel loss function that utilizes Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) to counteract the detrimental effects of non-independently and identically distributed (Non-IID) and unbalanced data. Utilizing the BEV transformer as the primary model, our rigorous testing on the OpenV2V dataset, augmented with FedBEVT data, demonstrates significant improvements in the average intersection over union (IoU). These results highlight the substantial potential of our federated learning framework to address data heterogeneity challenges in CP, thereby enhancing the accuracy of environmental perception models and facilitating more robust and efficient collaborative learning solutions in the transportation sector.

LiDAR Point Cloud-based Multiple Vehicle Tracking with Probabilistic Measurement-Region Association

Multiple extended target tracking (ETT) has gained increasing attention due to the development of high-precision LiDAR and radar sensors in automotive applications. For LiDAR point cloud-based vehicle tracking, this paper presents a probabilistic measurement-region association (PMRA) ETT model, which can describe the complex measurement distribution by partitioning the target extent into different regions. The PMRA model overcomes the drawbacks of previous data-region association (DRA) models by eliminating the approximation error of constrained estimation and using continuous integrals to more reliably calculate the association probabilities. Furthermore, the PMRA model is integrated with the Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) filter for tracking multiple vehicles. Simulation results illustrate the superior estimation accuracy of the proposed PMRA-PMBM filter in terms of both positions and extents of the vehicles comparing with PMBM filters using the gamma Gaussian inverse Wishart and DRA implementations.

Low-Multi-Rank High-Order Bayesian Robust Tensor Factorization

The recently proposed tensor robust principal component analysis (TRPCA) methods based on tensor singular value decomposition (t-SVD) have achieved numerous successes in many fields. However, most of these methods are only applicable to third-order tensors, whereas the data obtained in practice are often of higher order, such as fourth-order color videos, fourth-order hyperspectral videos, and fifth-order light-field images. Additionally, in the t-SVD framework, the multi-rank of a tensor can describe more fine-grained low-rank structure in the tensor compared with the tubal rank. However, determining the multi-rank of a tensor is a much more difficult problem than determining the tubal rank. Moreover, most of the existing TRPCA methods do not explicitly model the noises except the sparse noise, which may compromise the accuracy of estimating the low-rank tensor. In this work, we propose a novel high-order TRPCA method, named as Low-Multi-rank High-order Bayesian Robust Tensor Factorization (LMH-BRTF), within the Bayesian framework. Specifically, we decompose the observed corrupted tensor into three parts, i.e., the low-rank component, the sparse component, and the noise component. By constructing a low-rank model for the low-rank component based on the order-$d$ t-SVD and introducing a proper prior for the model, LMH-BRTF can automatically determine the tensor multi-rank. Meanwhile, benefiting from the explicit modeling of both the sparse and noise components, the proposed method can leverage information from the noises more effectivly, leading to an improved performance of TRPCA. Then, an efficient variational inference algorithm is established for parameters estimation. Empirical studies on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of both qualitative and quantitative results.

Unpaired MRI Super Resolution with Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning

High-resolution (HR) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for enhancing diagnostic accuracy in clinical settings. Nonetheless, the inherent limitation of MRI resolution restricts its widespread applicability. Deep learning-based image super-resolution (SR) methods exhibit promise in improving MRI resolution without additional cost. However, these methods frequently require a substantial number of HR MRI images for training, which can be challenging to acquire. In this paper, we propose an unpaired MRI SR approach that employs self-supervised contrastive learning to enhance SR performance with limited training data. Our approach leverages both authentic HR images and synthetically generated SR images to construct positive and negative sample pairs, thus facilitating the learning of discriminative features. Empirical results presented in this study underscore significant enhancements in the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index, even when a paucity of HR images is available. These findings accentuate the potential of our approach in addressing the challenge of limited training data, thereby contributing to the advancement of high-resolution MRI in clinical applications.

V2X Cooperative Perception for Autonomous Driving: Recent Advances and Challenges

Accurate perception is essential for advancing autonomous driving and addressing safety challenges in modern transportation systems. Despite significant advancements in computer vision for object recognition, current perception methods still face difficulties in complex real-world traffic environments. Challenges such as physical occlusion and limited sensor field of view persist for individual vehicle systems. Cooperative Perception (CP) with Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) technologies has emerged as a solution to overcome these obstacles and enhance driving automation systems. While some research has explored CP's fundamental architecture and critical components, there remains a lack of comprehensive summaries of the latest innovations, particularly in the context of V2X communication technologies. To address this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of CP technologies, spanning from early explorations to recent developments, including advancements in V2X communication technologies. Additionally, a contemporary generic framework is proposed to illustrate the V2X-based CP workflow, aiding in the structured understanding of CP system components. Furthermore, this paper categorizes prevailing V2X-based CP methodologies based on the critical issues they address. An extensive literature review is conducted within this taxonomy, evaluating existing datasets and simulators. Finally, open challenges and future directions in CP for autonomous driving are discussed by considering both perception and V2X communication advancements.

Which Framework is Suitable for Online 3D Multi-Object Tracking for Autonomous Driving with Automotive 4D Imaging Radar?

Online 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) has recently received significant research interests due to the expanding demand of 3D perception in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD). Among the existing 3D MOT frameworks for ADAS and AD, conventional point object tracking (POT) framework using the tracking-by-detection (TBD) strategy has been well studied and accepted for LiDAR and 4D imaging radar point clouds. In contrast, extended object tracking (EOT), another important framework which accepts the joint-detection-and-tracking (JDT) strategy, has rarely been explored for online 3D MOT applications. This paper provides the first systematical investigation of the EOT framework for online 3D MOT in real-world ADAS and AD scenarios. Specifically, the widely accepted TBD-POT framework, the recently investigated JDT-EOT framework, and our proposed TBD-EOT framework are compared via extensive evaluations on two open source 4D imaging radar datasets: View-of-Delft and TJ4DRadSet. Experiment results demonstrate that the conventional TBD-POT framework remains preferable for online 3D MOT with high tracking performance and low computational complexity, while the proposed TBD-EOT framework has the potential to outperform it in certain situations. However, the results also show that the JDT-EOT framework encounters multiple problems and performs inadequately in evaluation scenarios. After analyzing the causes of these phenomena based on various evaluation metrics and visualizations, we provide possible guidelines to improve the performance of these MOT frameworks on real-world data. These provide the first benchmark and important insights for the future development of 4D imaging radar-based online 3D MOT.

Batch Implicit Neural Representation for MRI Parallel Reconstruction

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) always suffered from the problem of long acquisition time. MRI reconstruction is one solution to reduce scan time by skipping certain phase-encoding lines and then restoring high-quality images from undersampled measurements. Recently, implicit neural representation (INR) has emerged as a new deep learning method that represents an object as a continuous function of spatial coordinates, and this function is normally parameterized by a multilayer perceptron (MLP). In this paper, we propose a novel MRI reconstruction method based on INR, which represents the fully-sampled images as the function of pixel coordinates and prior feature vectors of undersampled images for overcoming the generalization problem of INR. Specifically, we introduce a scale-embedded encoder to produce scale-independent pixel-specific features from MR images with different undersampled scales and then concatenate with coordinates vectors to recover fully-sampled MR images via an MLP, thus achieving arbitrary scale reconstruction. The performance of the proposed method was assessed by experimenting on publicly available MRI datasets and compared with other reconstruction methods. Our quantitative evaluation demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method over alternative reconstruction methods.