The RoboDrive Challenge: Drive Anytime Anywhere in Any Condition

In the realm of autonomous driving, robust perception under out-of-distribution conditions is paramount for the safe deployment of vehicles. Challenges such as adverse weather, sensor malfunctions, and environmental unpredictability can severely impact the performance of autonomous systems. The 2024 RoboDrive Challenge was crafted to propel the development of driving perception technologies that can withstand and adapt to these real-world variabilities. Focusing on four pivotal tasks -- BEV detection, map segmentation, semantic occupancy prediction, and multi-view depth estimation -- the competition laid down a gauntlet to innovate and enhance system resilience against typical and atypical disturbances. This year's challenge consisted of five distinct tracks and attracted 140 registered teams from 93 institutes across 11 countries, resulting in nearly one thousand submissions evaluated through our servers. The competition culminated in 15 top-performing solutions, which introduced a range of innovative approaches including advanced data augmentation, multi-sensor fusion, self-supervised learning for error correction, and new algorithmic strategies to enhance sensor robustness. These contributions significantly advanced the state of the art, particularly in handling sensor inconsistencies and environmental variability. Participants, through collaborative efforts, pushed the boundaries of current technologies, showcasing their potential in real-world scenarios. Extensive evaluations and analyses provided insights into the effectiveness of these solutions, highlighting key trends and successful strategies for improving the resilience of driving perception systems. This challenge has set a new benchmark in the field, providing a rich repository of techniques expected to guide future research in this field.

LIGHT: Joint Individual Building Extraction and Height Estimation from Satellite Images through a Unified Multitask Learning Network

Building extraction and height estimation are two important basic tasks in remote sensing image interpretation, which are widely used in urban planning, real-world 3D construction, and other fields. Most of the existing research regards the two tasks as independent studies. Therefore the height information cannot be fully used to improve the accuracy of building extraction and vice versa. In this work, we combine the individuaL buIlding extraction and heiGHt estimation through a unified multiTask learning network (LIGHT) for the first time, which simultaneously outputs a height map, bounding boxes, and a segmentation mask map of buildings. Specifically, LIGHT consists of an instance segmentation branch and a height estimation branch. In particular, so as to effectively unify multi-scale feature branches and alleviate feature spans between branches, we propose a Gated Cross Task Interaction (GCTI) module that can efficiently perform feature interaction between branches. Experiments on the DFC2023 dataset show that our LIGHT can achieve superior performance, and our GCTI module with ResNet101 as the backbone can significantly improve the performance of multitask learning by 2.8% AP50 and 6.5% delta1, respectively.