ProtoOcc: Accurate, Efficient 3D Occupancy Prediction Using Dual Branch Encoder-Prototype Query Decoder

In this paper, we introduce ProtoOcc, a novel 3D occupancy prediction model designed to predict the occupancy states and semantic classes of 3D voxels through a deep semantic understanding of scenes. ProtoOcc consists of two main components: the Dual Branch Encoder (DBE) and the Prototype Query Decoder (PQD). The DBE produces a new 3D voxel representation by combining 3D voxel and BEV representations across multiple scales through a dual branch structure. This design enhances both performance and computational efficiency by providing a large receptive field for the BEV representation while maintaining a smaller receptive field for the voxel representation. The PQD introduces Prototype Queries to accelerate the decoding process. Scene-Adaptive Prototypes are derived from the 3D voxel features of input sample, while Scene-Agnostic Prototypes are computed by applying Scene-Adaptive Prototypes to an Exponential Moving Average during the training phase. By using these prototype-based queries for decoding, we can directly predict 3D occupancy in a single step, eliminating the need for iterative Transformer decoding. Additionally, we propose the Robust Prototype Learning, which injects noise into prototype generation process and trains the model to denoise during the training phase. ProtoOcc achieves state-of-the-art performance with 45.02% mIoU on the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark. For single-frame method, it reaches 39.56% mIoU with an inference speed of 12.83 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 3090. Our code can be found at https://github.com/SPA-junghokim/ProtoOcc.

CRT-Fusion: Camera, Radar, Temporal Fusion Using Motion Information for 3D Object Detection

Accurate and robust 3D object detection is a critical component in autonomous vehicles and robotics. While recent radar-camera fusion methods have made significant progress by fusing information in the bird's-eye view (BEV) representation, they often struggle to effectively capture the motion of dynamic objects, leading to limited performance in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce CRT-Fusion, a novel framework that integrates temporal information into radar-camera fusion to address this challenge. Our approach comprises three key modules: Multi-View Fusion (MVF), Motion Feature Estimator (MFE), and Motion Guided Temporal Fusion (MGTF). The MVF module fuses radar and image features within both the camera view and bird's-eye view, thereby generating a more precise unified BEV representation. The MFE module conducts two simultaneous tasks: estimation of pixel-wise velocity information and BEV segmentation. Based on the velocity and the occupancy score map obtained from the MFE module, the MGTF module aligns and fuses feature maps across multiple timestamps in a recurrent manner. By considering the motion of dynamic objects, CRT-Fusion can produce robust BEV feature maps, thereby improving detection accuracy and robustness. Extensive evaluations on the challenging nuScenes dataset demonstrate that CRT-Fusion achieves state-of-the-art performance for radar-camera-based 3D object detection. Our approach outperforms the previous best method in terms of NDS by +1.7%, while also surpassing the leading approach in mAP by +1.4%. These significant improvements in both metrics showcase the effectiveness of our proposed fusion strategy in enhancing the reliability and accuracy of 3D object detection.

JARViS: Detecting Actions in Video Using Unified Actor-Scene Context Relation Modeling

Video action detection (VAD) is a formidable vision task that involves the localization and classification of actions within the spatial and temporal dimensions of a video clip. Among the myriad VAD architectures, two-stage VAD methods utilize a pre-trained person detector to extract the region of interest features, subsequently employing these features for action detection. However, the performance of two-stage VAD methods has been limited as they depend solely on localized actor features to infer action semantics. In this study, we propose a new two-stage VAD framework called Joint Actor-scene context Relation modeling based on Visual Semantics (JARViS), which effectively consolidates cross-modal action semantics distributed globally across spatial and temporal dimensions using Transformer attention. JARViS employs a person detector to produce densely sampled actor features from a keyframe. Concurrently, it uses a video backbone to create spatio-temporal scene features from a video clip. Finally, the fine-grained interactions between actors and scenes are modeled through a Unified Action-Scene Context Transformer to directly output the final set of actions in parallel. Our experimental results demonstrate that JARViS outperforms existing methods by significant margins and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular VAD datasets, including AVA, UCF101-24, and JHMDB51-21.

Distribution-Aware Robust Learning from Long-Tailed Data with Noisy Labels

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable advancements in various fields using large, well-annotated datasets. However, real-world data often exhibit long-tailed distributions and label noise, significantly degrading generalization performance. Recent studies addressing these issues have focused on noisy sample selection methods that estimate the centroid of each class based on high-confidence samples within each target class. The performance of these methods is limited because they use only the training samples within each class for class centroid estimation, making the quality of centroids susceptible to long-tailed distributions and noisy labels. In this study, we present a robust training framework called Distribution-aware Sample Selection and Contrastive Learning (DaSC). Specifically, DaSC introduces a Distribution-aware Class Centroid Estimation (DaCC) to generate enhanced class centroids. DaCC performs weighted averaging of the features from all samples, with weights determined based on model predictions. Additionally, we propose a confidence-aware contrastive learning strategy to obtain balanced and robust representations. The training samples are categorized into high-confidence and low-confidence samples. Our method then applies Semi-supervised Balanced Contrastive Loss (SBCL) using high-confidence samples, leveraging reliable label information to mitigate class bias. For the low-confidence samples, our method computes Mixup-enhanced Instance Discrimination Loss (MIDL) to improve their representations in a self-supervised manner. Our experimental results on CIFAR and real-world noisy-label datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed DaSC compared to previous approaches.

Mask2Map: Vectorized HD Map Construction Using Bird's Eye View Segmentation Masks

In this paper, we introduce Mask2Map, a novel end-to-end online HD map construction method designed for autonomous driving applications. Our approach focuses on predicting the class and ordered point set of map instances within a scene, represented in the bird's eye view (BEV). Mask2Map consists of two primary components: the Instance-Level Mask Prediction Network (IMPNet) and the Mask-Driven Map Prediction Network (MMPNet). IMPNet generates Mask-Aware Queries and BEV Segmentation Masks to capture comprehensive semantic information globally. Subsequently, MMPNet enhances these query features using local contextual information through two submodules: the Positional Query Generator (PQG) and the Geometric Feature Extractor (GFE). PQG extracts instance-level positional queries by embedding BEV positional information into Mask-Aware Queries, while GFE utilizes BEV Segmentation Masks to generate point-level geometric features. However, we observed limited performance in Mask2Map due to inter-network inconsistency stemming from different predictions to Ground Truth (GT) matching between IMPNet and MMPNet. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Inter-network Denoising Training method, which guides the model to denoise the output affected by both noisy GT queries and perturbed GT Segmentation Masks. Our evaluation conducted on nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmarks demonstrates that Mask2Map achieves remarkable performance improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods, with gains of 10.1% mAP and 4.1 mAP, respectively. Our code can be found at https://github.com/SehwanChoi0307/Mask2Map.

Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation Using Target-Oriented Domain Augmentation for 3D Object Detection

3D object detection is crucial for applications like autonomous driving and robotics. However, in real-world environments, variations in sensor data distribution due to sensor upgrades, weather changes, and geographic differences can adversely affect detection performance. Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) aims to mitigate these challenges by transferring knowledge from a source domain, abundant in labeled data, to a target domain where labels are scarce. This paper presents a new SSDA method referred to as Target-Oriented Domain Augmentation (TODA) specifically tailored for LiDAR-based 3D object detection. TODA efficiently utilizes all available data, including labeled data in the source domain, and both labeled data and unlabeled data in the target domain to enhance domain adaptation performance. TODA consists of two stages: TargetMix and AdvMix. TargetMix employs mixing augmentation accounting for LiDAR sensor characteristics to facilitate feature alignment between the source-domain and target-domain. AdvMix applies point-wise adversarial augmentation with mixing augmentation, which perturbs the unlabeled data to align the features within both labeled and unlabeled data in the target domain. Our experiments conducted on the challenging domain adaptation tasks demonstrate that TODA outperforms existing domain adaptation techniques designed for 3D object detection by significant margins. The code is available at: https://github.com/rasd3/TODA.

Fine-Grained Pillar Feature Encoding Via Spatio-Temporal Virtual Grid for 3D Object Detection

Developing high-performance, real-time architectures for LiDAR-based 3D object detectors is essential for the successful commercialization of autonomous vehicles. Pillar-based methods stand out as a practical choice for onboard deployment due to their computational efficiency. However, despite their efficiency, these methods can sometimes underperform compared to alternative point encoding techniques such as Voxel-encoding or PointNet++. We argue that current pillar-based methods have not sufficiently captured the fine-grained distributions of LiDAR points within each pillar structure. Consequently, there exists considerable room for improvement in pillar feature encoding. In this paper, we introduce a novel pillar encoding architecture referred to as Fine-Grained Pillar Feature Encoding (FG-PFE). FG-PFE utilizes Spatio-Temporal Virtual (STV) grids to capture the distribution of point clouds within each pillar across vertical, temporal, and horizontal dimensions. Through STV grids, points within each pillar are individually encoded using Vertical PFE (V-PFE), Temporal PFE (T-PFE), and Horizontal PFE (H-PFE). These encoded features are then aggregated through an Attentive Pillar Aggregation method. Our experiments conducted on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that FG-PFE achieves significant performance improvements over baseline models such as PointPillar, CenterPoint-Pillar, and PillarNet, with only a minor increase in computational overhead.

RadarDistill: Boosting Radar-based Object Detection Performance via Knowledge Distillation from LiDAR Features

The inherent noisy and sparse characteristics of radar data pose challenges in finding effective representations for 3D object detection. In this paper, we propose RadarDistill, a novel knowledge distillation (KD) method, which can improve the representation of radar data by leveraging LiDAR data. RadarDistill successfully transfers desirable characteristics of LiDAR features into radar features using three key components: Cross-Modality Alignment (CMA), Activation-based Feature Distillation (AFD), and Proposal-based Feature Distillation (PFD). CMA enhances the density of radar features through multiple layers of dilation operations, effectively addressing the challenges of inefficient knowledge transfer from LiDAR to radar. AFD is designed to transfer knowledge from significant areas of the LiDAR features, specifically those regions where activation intensity exceeds a predetermined threshold. PFD guides the radar network to mimic LiDAR network features in the object proposals for accurately detected results while moderating features for misdetected proposals like false positives. Our comparative analyses conducted on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that RadarDistill achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for radar-only object detection task, recording 20.5% in mAP and 43.7% in NDS. Also, RadarDistill significantly improves the performance of the camera-radar fusion model.

PillarGen: Enhancing Radar Point Cloud Density and Quality via Pillar-based Point Generation Network

In this paper, we present a novel point generation model, referred to as Pillar-based Point Generation Network (PillarGen), which facilitates the transformation of point clouds from one domain into another. PillarGen can produce synthetic point clouds with enhanced density and quality based on the provided input point clouds. The PillarGen model performs the following three steps: 1) pillar encoding, 2) Occupied Pillar Prediction (OPP), and 3) Pillar to Point Generation (PPG). The input point clouds are encoded using a pillar grid structure to generate pillar features. Then, OPP determines the active pillars used for point generation and predicts the center of points and the number of points to be generated for each active pillar. PPG generates the synthetic points for each active pillar based on the information provided by OPP. We evaluate the performance of PillarGen using our proprietary radar dataset, focusing on enhancing the density and quality of short-range radar data using the long-range radar data as supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that PillarGen outperforms traditional point upsampling methods in quantitative and qualitative measures. We also confirm that when PillarGen is incorporated into bird's eye view object detection, a significant improvement in detection accuracy is achieved.

Unified Contrastive Fusion Transformer for Multimodal Human Action Recognition

Various types of sensors have been considered to develop human action recognition (HAR) models. Robust HAR performance can be achieved by fusing multimodal data acquired by different sensors. In this paper, we introduce a new multimodal fusion architecture, referred to as Unified Contrastive Fusion Transformer (UCFFormer) designed to integrate data with diverse distributions to enhance HAR performance. Based on the embedding features extracted from each modality, UCFFormer employs the Unified Transformer to capture the inter-dependency among embeddings in both time and modality domains. We present the Factorized Time-Modality Attention to perform self-attention efficiently for the Unified Transformer. UCFFormer also incorporates contrastive learning to reduce the discrepancy in feature distributions across various modalities, thus generating semantically aligned features for information fusion. Performance evaluation conducted on two popular datasets, UTD-MHAD and NTU RGB+D, demonstrates that UCFFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming competing methods by considerable margins.