LineMarkNet: Line Landmark Detection for Valet Parking

We aim for accurate and efficient line landmark detection for valet parking, which is a long-standing yet unsolved problem in autonomous driving. To this end, we present a deep line landmark detection system where we carefully design the modules to be lightweight. Specifically, we first empirically design four general line landmarks including three physical lines and one novel mental line. The four line landmarks are effective for valet parking. We then develop a deep network (LineMarkNet) to detect line landmarks from surround-view cameras where we, via the pre-calibrated homography, fuse context from four separate cameras into the unified bird-eye-view (BEV) space, specifically we fuse the surroundview features and BEV features, then employ the multi-task decoder to detect multiple line landmarks where we apply the center-based strategy for object detection task, and design our graph transformer to enhance the vision transformer with hierarchical level graph reasoning for semantic segmentation task. At last, we further parameterize the detected line landmarks (e.g., intercept-slope form) whereby a novel filtering backend incorporates temporal and multi-view consistency to achieve smooth and stable detection. Moreover, we annotate a large-scale dataset to validate our method. Experimental results show that our framework achieves the enhanced performance compared with several line detection methods and validate the multi-task network's efficiency about the real-time line landmark detection on the Qualcomm 820A platform while meantime keeps superior accuracy, with our deep line landmark detection system.

PPD: A New Valet Parking Pedestrian Fisheye Dataset for Autonomous Driving

Pedestrian detection under valet parking scenarios is fundamental for autonomous driving. However, the presence of pedestrians can be manifested in a variety of ways and postures under imperfect ambient conditions, which can adversely affect detection performance. Furthermore, models trained on publicdatasets that include pedestrians generally provide suboptimal outcomes for these valet parking scenarios. In this paper, wepresent the Parking Pedestrian Dataset (PPD), a large-scale fisheye dataset to support research dealing with real-world pedestrians, especially with occlusions and diverse postures. PPD consists of several distinctive types of pedestrians captured with fisheye cameras. Additionally, we present a pedestrian detection baseline on PPD dataset, and introduce two data augmentation techniques to improve the baseline by enhancing the diversity ofthe original dataset. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our novel data augmentation approaches over baselinesand the dataset's exceptional generalizability.

ADD: An Automatic Desensitization Fisheye Dataset for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving systems require many images for analyzing the surrounding environment. However, there is fewer data protection for private information among these captured images, such as pedestrian faces or vehicle license plates, which has become a significant issue. In this paper, in response to the call for data security laws and regulations and based on the advantages of large Field of View(FoV) of the fisheye camera, we build the first Autopilot Desensitization Dataset, called ADD, and formulate the first deep-learning-based image desensitization framework, to promote the study of image desensitization in autonomous driving scenarios. The compiled dataset consists of 650K images, including different face and vehicle license plate information captured by the surround-view fisheye camera. It covers various autonomous driving scenarios, including diverse facial characteristics and license plate colors. Then, we propose an efficient multitask desensitization network called DesCenterNet as a benchmark on the ADD dataset, which can perform face and vehicle license plate detection and desensitization tasks. Based on ADD, we further provide an evaluation criterion for desensitization performance, and extensive comparison experiments have verified the effectiveness and superiority of our method on image desensitization.

Graph-Segmenter: Graph Transformer with Boundary-aware Attention for Semantic Segmentation

The transformer-based semantic segmentation approaches, which divide the image into different regions by sliding windows and model the relation inside each window, have achieved outstanding success. However, since the relation modeling between windows was not the primary emphasis of previous work, it was not fully utilized. To address this issue, we propose a Graph-Segmenter, including a Graph Transformer and a Boundary-aware Attention module, which is an effective network for simultaneously modeling the more profound relation between windows in a global view and various pixels inside each window as a local one, and for substantial low-cost boundary adjustment. Specifically, we treat every window and pixel inside the window as nodes to construct graphs for both views and devise the Graph Transformer. The introduced boundary-aware attention module optimizes the edge information of the target objects by modeling the relationship between the pixel on the object's edge. Extensive experiments on three widely used semantic segmentation datasets (Cityscapes, ADE-20k and PASCAL Context) demonstrate that our proposed network, a Graph Transformer with Boundary-aware Attention, can achieve state-of-the-art segmentation performance.

CAT: Learning to Collaborate Channel and Spatial Attention from Multi-Information Fusion

Channel and spatial attention mechanism has proven to provide an evident performance boost of deep convolution neural networks (CNNs). Most existing methods focus on one or run them parallel (series), neglecting the collaboration between the two attentions. In order to better establish the feature interaction between the two types of attention, we propose a plug-and-play attention module, which we term "CAT"-activating the Collaboration between spatial and channel Attentions based on learned Traits. Specifically, we represent traits as trainable coefficients (i.e., colla-factors) to adaptively combine contributions of different attention modules to fit different image hierarchies and tasks better. Moreover, we propose the global entropy pooling (GEP) apart from global average pooling (GAP) and global maximum pooling (GMP) operators, an effective component in suppressing noise signals by measuring the information disorder of feature maps. We introduce a three-way pooling operation into attention modules and apply the adaptive mechanism to fuse their outcomes. Extensive experiments on MS COCO, Pascal-VOC, Cifar-100, and ImageNet show that our CAT outperforms existing state-of-the-art attention mechanisms in object detection, instance segmentation, and image classification. The model and code will be released soon.

Complete Solution for Vehicle Re-ID in Surround-view Camera System

Vehicle re-identification (Re-ID) is a critical component of the autonomous driving perception system, and research in this area has accelerated in recent years. However, there is yet no perfect solution to the vehicle re-identification issue associated with the car's surround-view camera system. Our analysis identifies two significant issues in the aforementioned scenario: i) It is difficult to identify the same vehicle in many picture frames due to the unique construction of the fisheye camera. ii) The appearance of the same vehicle when seen via the surround vision system's several cameras is rather different. To overcome these issues, we suggest an integrative vehicle Re-ID solution method. On the one hand, we provide a technique for determining the consistency of the tracking box drift with respect to the target. On the other hand, we combine a Re-ID network based on the attention mechanism with spatial limitations to increase performance in situations involving multiple cameras. Finally, our approach combines state-of-the-art accuracy with real-time performance. We will soon make the source code and annotated fisheye dataset available.

OCR-RTPS: An OCR-based real-time positioning system for the valet parking

Obtaining the position of ego-vehicle is a crucial prerequisite for automatic control and path planning in the field of autonomous driving. Most existing positioning systems rely on GPS, RTK, or wireless signals, which are arduous to provide effective localization under weak signal conditions. This paper proposes a real-time positioning system based on the detection of the parking numbers as they are unique positioning marks in the parking lot scene. It does not only can help with the positioning with open area, but also run independently under isolation environment. The result tested on both public datasets and self-collected dataset show that the system outperforms others in both performances and applies in practice. In addition, the code and dataset will release later.

Surround-view Fisheye BEV-Perception for Valet Parking: Dataset, Baseline and Distortion-insensitive Multi-task Framework

Surround-view fisheye perception under valet parking scenes is fundamental and crucial in autonomous driving. Environmental conditions in parking lots perform differently from the common public datasets, such as imperfect light and opacity, which substantially impacts on perception performance. Most existing networks based on public datasets may generalize suboptimal results on these valet parking scenes, also affected by the fisheye distortion. In this article, we introduce a new large-scale fisheye dataset called Fisheye Parking Dataset(FPD) to promote the research in dealing with diverse real-world surround-view parking cases. Notably, our compiled FPD exhibits excellent characteristics for different surround-view perception tasks. In addition, we also propose our real-time distortion-insensitive multi-task framework Fisheye Perception Network (FPNet), which improves the surround-view fisheye BEV perception by enhancing the fisheye distortion operation and multi-task lightweight designs. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach and the dataset's exceptional generalizability.

Detecting Owner-member Relationship with Graph Convolution Network in Fisheye Camera System

The owner-member relationship between wheels and vehicles contributes significantly to the 3D perception of vehicles, especially in embedded environments. However, to leverage this relationship we must face two major challenges: i) Traditional IoU-based heuristics have difficulty handling occluded traffic congestion scenarios. ii) The effectiveness and applicability of the solution in a vehicle-mounted system is difficult. To address these issues, we propose an innovative relationship prediction method, DeepWORD, by designing a graph convolutional network (GCN). Specifically, to improve the information richness, we use feature maps with local correlation as input to the nodes. Subsequently, we introduce a graph attention network (GAT) to dynamically correct the a priori estimation bias. Finally, we designed a dataset as a large-scale benchmark which has annotated owner-member relationship, called WORD. In the experiments we learned that the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art accuracy and real-time performance. The WORD dataset is made publicly available at https://github.com/NamespaceMain/ownermember-relationship-dataset.

DeepWORD: A GCN-based Approach for Owner-Member Relationship Detection in Autonomous Driving

It's worth noting that the owner-member relationship between wheels and vehicles has an significant contribution to the 3D perception of vehicles, especially in the embedded environment. However, there are currently two main challenges about the above relationship prediction: i) The traditional heuristic methods based on IoU can hardly deal with the traffic jam scenarios for the occlusion. ii) It is difficult to establish an efficient applicable solution for the vehicle-mounted system. To address these issues, we propose an innovative relationship prediction method, namely DeepWORD, by designing a graph convolution network (GCN). Specifically, we utilize the feature maps with local correlation as the input of nodes to improve the information richness. Besides, we introduce the graph attention network (GAT) to dynamically amend the prior estimation deviation. Furthermore, we establish an annotated owner-member relationship dataset called WORD as a large-scale benchmark, which will be available soon. The experiments demonstrate that our solution achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and real-time in practice.