TempBEV: Improving Learned BEV Encoders with Combined Image and BEV Space Temporal Aggregation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Monninger, Thomas, Dokkadi, Vandana, Anwar, Md Zafar, Staab, Steffen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Monninger, Thomas
Dokkadi, Vandana
Anwar, Md Zafar
Staab, Steffen
author_facet Monninger, Thomas
Dokkadi, Vandana
Anwar, Md Zafar
Staab, Steffen
contents Autonomous driving requires an accurate representation of the environment. A strategy toward high accuracy is to fuse data from several sensors. Learned Bird's-Eye View (BEV) encoders can achieve this by mapping data from individual sensors into one joint latent space. For cost-efficient camera-only systems, this provides an effective mechanism to fuse data from multiple cameras with different views. Accuracy can further be improved by aggregating sensor information over time. This is especially important in monocular camera systems to account for the lack of explicit depth and velocity measurements. Thereby, the effectiveness of developed BEV encoders crucially depends on the operators used to aggregate temporal information and on the used latent representation spaces. We analyze BEV encoders proposed in the literature and compare their effectiveness, quantifying the effects of aggregation operators and latent representations. While most existing approaches aggregate temporal information either in image or in BEV latent space, our analyses and performance comparisons suggest that these latent representations exhibit complementary strengths. Therefore, we develop a novel temporal BEV encoder, TempBEV, which integrates aggregated temporal information from both latent spaces. We consider subsequent image frames as stereo through time and leverage methods from optical flow estimation for temporal stereo encoding. Empirical evaluation on the NuScenes dataset shows a significant improvement by TempBEV over the baseline for 3D object detection and BEV segmentation. The ablation uncovers a strong synergy of joint temporal aggregation in the image and BEV latent space. These results indicate the overall effectiveness of our approach and make a strong case for aggregating temporal information in both image and BEV latent spaces.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_11803
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TempBEV: Improving Learned BEV Encoders with Combined Image and BEV Space Temporal Aggregation
Monninger, Thomas
Dokkadi, Vandana
Anwar, Md Zafar
Staab, Steffen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
Autonomous driving requires an accurate representation of the environment. A strategy toward high accuracy is to fuse data from several sensors. Learned Bird's-Eye View (BEV) encoders can achieve this by mapping data from individual sensors into one joint latent space. For cost-efficient camera-only systems, this provides an effective mechanism to fuse data from multiple cameras with different views. Accuracy can further be improved by aggregating sensor information over time. This is especially important in monocular camera systems to account for the lack of explicit depth and velocity measurements. Thereby, the effectiveness of developed BEV encoders crucially depends on the operators used to aggregate temporal information and on the used latent representation spaces. We analyze BEV encoders proposed in the literature and compare their effectiveness, quantifying the effects of aggregation operators and latent representations. While most existing approaches aggregate temporal information either in image or in BEV latent space, our analyses and performance comparisons suggest that these latent representations exhibit complementary strengths. Therefore, we develop a novel temporal BEV encoder, TempBEV, which integrates aggregated temporal information from both latent spaces. We consider subsequent image frames as stereo through time and leverage methods from optical flow estimation for temporal stereo encoding. Empirical evaluation on the NuScenes dataset shows a significant improvement by TempBEV over the baseline for 3D object detection and BEV segmentation. The ablation uncovers a strong synergy of joint temporal aggregation in the image and BEV latent space. These results indicate the overall effectiveness of our approach and make a strong case for aggregating temporal information in both image and BEV latent spaces.
title TempBEV: Improving Learned BEV Encoders with Combined Image and BEV Space Temporal Aggregation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11803