DSRC: Learning Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware Collaborative Representation against Corruptions

As a potential application of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, multi-agent collaborative perception has achieved significant success in 3D object detection. While these methods have demonstrated impressive results on standard benchmarks, the robustness of such approaches in the face of complex real-world environments requires additional verification. To bridge this gap, we introduce the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of collaborative perception methods in the presence of natural corruptions typical of real-world environments. Furthermore, we propose DSRC, a robustness-enhanced collaborative perception method aiming to learn Density-insensitive and Semantic-aware collaborative Representation against Corruptions. DSRC consists of two key designs: i) a semantic-guided sparse-to-dense distillation framework, which constructs multi-view dense objects painted by ground truth bounding boxes to effectively learn density-insensitive and semantic-aware collaborative representation; ii) a feature-to-point cloud reconstruction approach to better fuse critical collaborative representation across agents. To thoroughly evaluate DSRC, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world and simulated datasets. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms SOTA collaborative perception methods in both clean and corrupted conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/Terry9a/DSRC.

A Comprehensive Study of PAPR Reduction Techniques for Deep Joint Source Channel Coding in OFDM Systems

Recently, deep joint source channel coding (DJSCC) techniques have been extensively studied and have shown significant performance with limited bandwidth and low signal to noise ratio. Most DJSCC work considers discrete-time analog transmission, while combining it with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) creates serious high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem. This paper conducts a comprehensive analysis on the use of various OFDM PAPR reduction techniques in the DJSCC system, including both conventional techniques such as clipping, companding, SLM and PTS, and deep learning-based PAPR reduction techniques such as PAPR loss and clipping with retraining. Our investigation shows that although conventional PAPR reduction techniques can be applied to DJSCC, their performance in DJSCC is different from the conventional split source channel coding. Moreover, we observe that for signal distortion PAPR reduction techniques, clipping with retraining achieves the best performance in terms of both PAPR reduction and recovery accuracy. It is also noticed that signal non-distortion PAPR reduction techniques can successfully reduce the PAPR in DJSCC without compromise to signal reconstruction.

Poses as Queries: Image-to-LiDAR Map Localization with Transformers

High-precision vehicle localization with commercial setups is a crucial technique for high-level autonomous driving tasks. Localization with a monocular camera in LiDAR map is a newly emerged approach that achieves promising balance between cost and accuracy, but estimating pose by finding correspondences between such cross-modal sensor data is challenging, thereby damaging the localization accuracy. In this paper, we address the problem by proposing a novel Transformer-based neural network to register 2D images into 3D LiDAR map in an end-to-end manner. Poses are implicitly represented as high-dimensional feature vectors called pose queries and can be iteratively updated by interacting with the retrieved relevant information from cross-model features using attention mechanism in a proposed POse Estimator Transformer (POET) module. Moreover, we apply a multiple hypotheses aggregation method that estimates the final poses by performing parallel optimization on multiple randomly initialized pose queries to reduce the network uncertainty. Comprehensive analysis and experimental results on public benchmark conclude that the proposed image-to-LiDAR map localization network could achieve state-of-the-art performances in challenging cross-modal localization tasks.