InteractionNet: Joint Planning and Prediction for Autonomous Driving with Transformers

Planning and prediction are two important modules of autonomous driving and have experienced tremendous advancement recently. Nevertheless, most existing methods regard planning and prediction as independent and ignore the correlation between them, leading to the lack of consideration for interaction and dynamic changes of traffic scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose InteractionNet, which leverages transformer to share global contextual reasoning among all traffic participants to capture interaction and interconnect planning and prediction to achieve joint. Besides, InteractionNet deploys another transformer to help the model pay extra attention to the perceived region containing critical or unseen vehicles. InteractionNet outperforms other baselines in several benchmarks, especially in terms of safety, which benefits from the joint consideration of planning and forecasting. The code will be available at https://github.com/fujiawei0724/InteractionNet.

MLF-DET: Multi-Level Fusion for Cross-Modal 3D Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel and effective Multi-Level Fusion network, named as MLF-DET, for high-performance cross-modal 3D object DETection, which integrates both the feature-level fusion and decision-level fusion to fully utilize the information in the image. For the feature-level fusion, we present the Multi-scale Voxel Image fusion (MVI) module, which densely aligns multi-scale voxel features with image features. For the decision-level fusion, we propose the lightweight Feature-cued Confidence Rectification (FCR) module which further exploits image semantics to rectify the confidence of detection candidates. Besides, we design an effective data augmentation strategy termed Occlusion-aware GT Sampling (OGS) to reserve more sampled objects in the training scenes, so as to reduce overfitting. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, on the extremely competitive KITTI car 3D object detection benchmark, our method reaches 82.89% moderate AP and achieves state-of-the-art performance without bells and whistles.

StructVPR: Distill Structural Knowledge with Weighting Samples for Visual Place Recognition

Visual place recognition (VPR) is usually considered as a specific image retrieval problem. Limited by existing training frameworks, most deep learning-based works cannot extract sufficiently stable global features from RGB images and rely on a time-consuming re-ranking step to exploit spatial structural information for better performance. In this paper, we propose StructVPR, a novel training architecture for VPR, to enhance structural knowledge in RGB global features and thus improve feature stability in a constantly changing environment. Specifically, StructVPR uses segmentation images as a more definitive source of structural knowledge input into a CNN network and applies knowledge distillation to avoid online segmentation and inference of seg-branch in testing. Considering that not all samples contain high-quality and helpful knowledge, and some even hurt the performance of distillation, we partition samples and weigh each sample's distillation loss to enhance the expected knowledge precisely. Finally, StructVPR achieves impressive performance on several benchmarks using only global retrieval and even outperforms many two-stage approaches by a large margin. After adding additional re-ranking, ours achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a low computational cost.

TransVPR: Transformer-based place recognition with multi-level attention aggregation

Visual place recognition is a challenging task for applications such as autonomous driving navigation and mobile robot localization. Distracting elements presenting in complex scenes often lead to deviations in the perception of visual place. To address this problem, it is crucial to integrate information from only task-relevant regions into image representations. In this paper, we introduce a novel holistic place recognition model, TransVPR, based on vision Transformers. It benefits from the desirable property of the self-attention operation in Transformers which can naturally aggregate task-relevant features. Attentions from multiple levels of the Transformer, which focus on different regions of interest, are further combined to generate a global image representation. In addition, the output tokens from Transformer layers filtered by the fused attention mask are considered as key-patch descriptors, which are used to perform spatial matching to re-rank the candidates retrieved by the global image features. The whole model allows end-to-end training with a single objective and image-level supervision. TransVPR achieves state-of-the-art performance on several real-world benchmarks while maintaining low computational time and storage requirements.