QuadBEV: An Efficient Quadruple-Task Perception Framework via Bird's-Eye-View Representation

Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) perception has become a vital component of autonomous driving systems due to its ability to integrate multiple sensor inputs into a unified representation, enhancing performance in various downstream tasks. However, the computational demands of BEV models pose challenges for real-world deployment in vehicles with limited resources. To address these limitations, we propose QuadBEV, an efficient multitask perception framework that leverages the shared spatial and contextual information across four key tasks: 3D object detection, lane detection, map segmentation, and occupancy prediction. QuadBEV not only streamlines the integration of these tasks using a shared backbone and task-specific heads but also addresses common multitask learning challenges such as learning rate sensitivity and conflicting task objectives. Our framework reduces redundant computations, thereby enhancing system efficiency, making it particularly suited for embedded systems. We present comprehensive experiments that validate the effectiveness and robustness of QuadBEV, demonstrating its suitability for real-world applications.

Learning Content-Aware Multi-Modal Joint Input Pruning via Bird's-Eye-View Representation

In the landscape of autonomous driving, Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representation has recently garnered substantial academic attention, serving as a transformative framework for the fusion of multi-modal sensor inputs. This BEV paradigm effectively shifts the sensor fusion challenge from a rule-based methodology to a data-centric approach, thereby facilitating more nuanced feature extraction from an array of heterogeneous sensors. Notwithstanding its evident merits, the computational overhead associated with BEV-based techniques often mandates high-capacity hardware infrastructures, thus posing challenges for practical, real-world implementations. To mitigate this limitation, we introduce a novel content-aware multi-modal joint input pruning technique. Our method leverages BEV as a shared anchor to algorithmically identify and eliminate non-essential sensor regions prior to their introduction into the perception model's backbone. We validatethe efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on the NuScenes dataset, demonstrating substantial computational efficiency without sacrificing perception accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to alleviate the computational burden from the input pruning point.

Towards Efficient 3D Object Detection in Bird's-Eye-View Space for Autonomous Driving: A Convolutional-Only Approach

3D object detection in Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space has recently emerged as a prevalent approach in the field of autonomous driving. Despite the demonstrated improvements in accuracy and velocity estimation compared to perspective view methods, the deployment of BEV-based techniques in real-world autonomous vehicles remains challenging. This is primarily due to their reliance on vision-transformer (ViT) based architectures, which introduce quadratic complexity with respect to the input resolution. To address this issue, we propose an efficient BEV-based 3D detection framework called BEVENet, which leverages a convolutional-only architectural design to circumvent the limitations of ViT models while maintaining the effectiveness of BEV-based methods. Our experiments show that BEVENet is 3$\times$ faster than contemporary state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on the NuScenes challenge, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.456 and a nuScenes detection score (NDS) of 0.555 on the NuScenes validation dataset, with an inference speed of 47.6 frames per second. To the best of our knowledge, this study stands as the first to achieve such significant efficiency improvements for BEV-based methods, highlighting their enhanced feasibility for real-world autonomous driving applications.