Leveraging Temporal Contexts to Enhance Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative Perception

Infrastructure sensors installed at elevated positions offer a broader perception range and encounter fewer occlusions. Integrating both infrastructure and ego-vehicle data through V2X communication, known as vehicle-infrastructure cooperation, has shown considerable advantages in enhancing perception capabilities and addressing corner cases encountered in single-vehicle autonomous driving. However, cooperative perception still faces numerous challenges, including limited communication bandwidth and practical communication interruptions. In this paper, we propose CTCE, a novel framework for cooperative 3D object detection. This framework transmits queries with temporal contexts enhancement, effectively balancing transmission efficiency and performance to accommodate real-world communication conditions. Additionally, we propose a temporal-guided fusion module to further improve performance. The roadside temporal enhancement and vehicle-side spatial-temporal fusion together constitute a multi-level temporal contexts integration mechanism, fully leveraging temporal information to enhance performance. Furthermore, a motion-aware reconstruction module is introduced to recover lost roadside queries due to communication interruptions. Experimental results on V2X-Seq and V2X-Sim datasets demonstrate that CTCE outperforms the baseline QUEST, achieving improvements of 3.8% and 1.3% in mAP, respectively. Experiments under communication interruption conditions validate CTCE's robustness to communication interruptions.

End-to-End Autonomous Driving through V2X Cooperation

Cooperatively utilizing both ego-vehicle and infrastructure sensor data via V2X communication has emerged as a promising approach for advanced autonomous driving. However, current research mainly focuses on improving individual modules, rather than taking end-to-end learning to optimize final planning performance, resulting in underutilized data potential. In this paper, we introduce UniV2X, a pioneering cooperative autonomous driving framework that seamlessly integrates all key driving modules across diverse views into a unified network. We propose a sparse-dense hybrid data transmission and fusion mechanism for effective vehicle-infrastructure cooperation, offering three advantages: 1) Effective for simultaneously enhancing agent perception, online mapping, and occupancy prediction, ultimately improving planning performance. 2) Transmission-friendly for practical and limited communication conditions. 3) Reliable data fusion with interpretability of this hybrid data. We implement UniV2X, as well as reproducing several benchmark methods, on the challenging DAIR-V2X, the real-world cooperative driving dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of UniV2X in significantly enhancing planning performance, as well as all intermediate output performance. Code is at https://github.com/AIR-THU/UniV2X.