WidthFormer: Toward Efficient Transformer-based BEV View Transformation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Chenhongyi, Lin, Tianwei, Huang, Lichao, Crowley, Elliot J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yang, Chenhongyi
Lin, Tianwei
Huang, Lichao
Crowley, Elliot J.
author_facet Yang, Chenhongyi
Lin, Tianwei
Huang, Lichao
Crowley, Elliot J.
contents We present WidthFormer, a novel transformer-based module to compute Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representations from multi-view cameras for real-time autonomous-driving applications. WidthFormer is computationally efficient, robust and does not require any special engineering effort to deploy. We first introduce a novel 3D positional encoding mechanism capable of accurately encapsulating 3D geometric information, which enables our model to compute high-quality BEV representations with only a single transformer decoder layer. This mechanism is also beneficial for existing sparse 3D object detectors. Inspired by the recently proposed works, we further improve our model's efficiency by vertically compressing the image features when serving as attention keys and values, and then we develop two modules to compensate for potential information loss due to feature compression. Experimental evaluation on the widely-used nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark demonstrates that our method outperforms previous approaches across different 3D detection architectures. More importantly, our model is highly efficient. For example, when using $256\times 704$ input images, it achieves 1.5 ms and 2.8 ms latency on NVIDIA 3090 GPU and Horizon Journey-5 computation solutions. Furthermore, WidthFormer also exhibits strong robustness to different degrees of camera perturbations. Our study offers valuable insights into the deployment of BEV transformation methods in real-world, complex road environments. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/WidthFormer .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_03836
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WidthFormer: Toward Efficient Transformer-based BEV View Transformation
Yang, Chenhongyi
Lin, Tianwei
Huang, Lichao
Crowley, Elliot J.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present WidthFormer, a novel transformer-based module to compute Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representations from multi-view cameras for real-time autonomous-driving applications. WidthFormer is computationally efficient, robust and does not require any special engineering effort to deploy. We first introduce a novel 3D positional encoding mechanism capable of accurately encapsulating 3D geometric information, which enables our model to compute high-quality BEV representations with only a single transformer decoder layer. This mechanism is also beneficial for existing sparse 3D object detectors. Inspired by the recently proposed works, we further improve our model's efficiency by vertically compressing the image features when serving as attention keys and values, and then we develop two modules to compensate for potential information loss due to feature compression. Experimental evaluation on the widely-used nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark demonstrates that our method outperforms previous approaches across different 3D detection architectures. More importantly, our model is highly efficient. For example, when using $256\times 704$ input images, it achieves 1.5 ms and 2.8 ms latency on NVIDIA 3090 GPU and Horizon Journey-5 computation solutions. Furthermore, WidthFormer also exhibits strong robustness to different degrees of camera perturbations. Our study offers valuable insights into the deployment of BEV transformation methods in real-world, complex road environments. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenhongyiYang/WidthFormer .
title WidthFormer: Toward Efficient Transformer-based BEV View Transformation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03836