LiDAR-based End-to-end Temporal Perception for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation

Temporal perception, the ability to detect and track objects over time, is critical in autonomous driving for maintaining a comprehensive understanding of dynamic environments. However, this task is hindered by significant challenges, including incomplete perception caused by occluded objects and observational blind spots, which are common in single-vehicle perception systems. To address these issues, we introduce LET-VIC, a LiDAR-based End-to-End Tracking framework for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation (VIC). LET-VIC leverages Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to enhance temporal perception by fusing spatial and temporal data from both vehicle and infrastructure sensors. First, it spatially integrates Bird's Eye View (BEV) features from vehicle-side and infrastructure-side LiDAR data, creating a comprehensive view that mitigates occlusions and compensates for blind spots. Second, LET-VIC incorporates temporal context across frames, allowing the model to leverage historical data for enhanced tracking stability and accuracy. To further improve robustness, LET-VIC includes a Calibration Error Compensation (CEC) module to address sensor misalignments and ensure precise feature alignment. Experiments on the V2X-Seq-SPD dataset demonstrate that LET-VIC significantly outperforms baseline models, achieving at least a 13.7% improvement in mAP and a 13.1% improvement in AMOTA without considering communication delays. This work offers a practical solution and a new research direction for advancing temporal perception in autonomous driving through vehicle-infrastructure cooperation.