LiDAR Perception

Modern perception systems of autonomous vehicles are known to be sensitive to occlusions and lack the capability of long perceiving range. It has been one of the key bottlenecks that prevents Level 5 autonomy. Recent research has demonstrated that the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) cooperative perception system has great potential to revolutionize the autonomous driving industry. However, the lack of a real-world dataset hinders the progress of this field. To facilitate the development of cooperative perception, we present V2V4Real, the first large-scale real-world multi-modal dataset for V2V perception. The data is collected by two vehicles equipped with multi-modal sensors driving together through diverse scenarios. Our V2V4Real dataset covers a driving area of 410 km, comprising 20K LiDAR frames, 40K RGB frames, 240K annotated 3D bounding boxes for 5 classes, and HDMaps that cover all the driving routes. V2V4Real introduces three perception tasks, including cooperative 3D object detection, cooperative 3D object tracking, and Sim2Real domain adaptation for cooperative perception. We provide comprehensive benchmarks of recent cooperative perception algorithms on three tasks. The V2V4Real dataset can be found at research.seas.ucla.edu/mobility-lab/v2v4real/.

Intrinsic image decomposition (IID) is the task that decomposes a natural image into albedo and shade. While IID is typically solved through supervised learning methods, it is not ideal due to the difficulty in observing ground truth albedo and shade in general scenes. Conversely, unsupervised learning methods are currently underperforming supervised learning methods since there are no criteria for solving the ill-posed problems. Recently, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is widely used due to its ability to make highly precise distance measurements. Thus, we have focused on the utilization of LiDAR, especially LiDAR intensity, to address this issue. In this paper, we propose unsupervised intrinsic image decomposition with LiDAR intensity (IID-LI). Since the conventional unsupervised learning methods consist of image-to-image transformations, simply inputting LiDAR intensity is not an effective approach. Therefore, we design an intensity consistency loss that computes the error between LiDAR intensity and gray-scaled albedo to provide a criterion for the ill-posed problem. In addition, LiDAR intensity is difficult to handle due to its sparsity and occlusion, hence, a LiDAR intensity densification module is proposed. We verified the estimating quality using our own dataset, which include RGB images, LiDAR intensity and human judged annotations. As a result, we achieved an estimation accuracy that outperforms conventional unsupervised learning methods.

Due to the difficulty of annotating the 3D LiDAR data of autonomous driving, an efficient unsupervised 3D representation learning method is important. In this paper, we design the Triangle Constrained Contrast (TriCC) framework tailored for autonomous driving scenes which learns 3D unsupervised representations through both the multimodal information and dynamic of temporal sequences. We treat one camera image and two LiDAR point clouds with different timestamps as a triplet. And our key design is the consistent constraint that automatically finds matching relationships among the triplet through "self-cycle" and learns representations from it. With the matching relations across the temporal dimension and modalities, we can further conduct a triplet contrast to improve learning efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, TriCC is the first framework that unifies both the temporal and multimodal semantics, which means it utilizes almost all the information in autonomous driving scenes. And compared with previous contrastive methods, it can automatically dig out contrasting pairs with higher difficulty, instead of relying on handcrafted ones. Extensive experiments are conducted with Minkowski-UNet and VoxelNet on several semantic segmentation and 3D detection datasets. Results show that TriCC learns effective representations with much fewer training iterations and improves the SOTA results greatly on all the downstream tasks. Code and models can be found at https://bopang1996.github.io/.

Existing learning-based methods for point cloud rendering adopt various 3D representations and feature querying mechanisms to alleviate the sparsity problem of point clouds. However, artifacts still appear in the rendered images, due to the challenges in extracting continuous and discriminative 3D features from point clouds. In this paper, we present a dense while lightweight 3D representation, named TriVol, that can be combined with NeRF to render photo-realistic images from point clouds. Our TriVol consists of triple slim volumes, each of which is encoded from the input point cloud. Our representation has two advantages. First, it fuses the respective fields at different scales and thus extracts local and non-local features for discriminative representation. Second, since the volume size is greatly reduced, our 3D decoder can be efficiently inferred, allowing us to increase the resolution of the 3D space to render more point details. Extensive experiments on different benchmarks with varying kinds of scenes/objects demonstrate our framework's effectiveness compared with current approaches. Moreover, our framework has excellent generalization ability to render a category of scenes or objects without fine-tuning.

In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised object detection from 3D point clouds in self-driving scenes. We present a simple yet effective method that exploits (i) point clustering in near-range areas where the point clouds are dense, (ii) temporal consistency to filter out noisy unsupervised detections, (iii) translation equivariance of CNNs to extend the auto-labels to long range, and (iv) self-supervision for improving on its own. Our approach, OYSTER (Object Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Refinement), does not impose constraints on data collection (such as repeated traversals of the same location), is able to detect objects in a zero-shot manner without supervised finetuning (even in sparse, distant regions), and continues to self-improve given more rounds of iterative self-training. To better measure model performance in self-driving scenarios, we propose a new planning-centric perception metric based on distance-to-collision. We demonstrate that our unsupervised object detector significantly outperforms unsupervised baselines on PandaSet and Argoverse 2 Sensor dataset, showing promise that self-supervision combined with object priors can enable object discovery in the wild. For more information, visit the project website: https://waabi.ai/research/oyster.

Semantic perception is a core building block in autonomous driving, since it provides information about the drivable space and location of other traffic participants. For learning-based perception, often a large amount of diverse training data is necessary to achieve high performance. Data labeling is usually a bottleneck for developing such methods, especially for dense prediction tasks, e.g., semantic segmentation or panoptic segmentation. For 3D LiDAR data, the annotation process demands even more effort than for images. Especially in autonomous driving, point clouds are sparse, and objects appearance depends on its distance from the sensor, making it harder to acquire large amounts of labeled training data. This paper aims at taking an alternative path proposing a self-supervised representation learning method for 3D LiDAR data. Our approach exploits the vehicle motion to match objects across time viewed in different scans. We then train a model to maximize the point-wise feature similarities from points of the associated object in different scans, which enables to learn a consistent representation across time. The experimental results show that our approach performs better than previous state-of-the-art self-supervised representation learning methods when fine-tuning to different downstream tasks. We furthermore show that with only 10% of labeled data, a network pre-trained with our approach can achieve better performance than the same network trained from scratch with all labels for semantic segmentation on SemanticKITTI.

We present a Non-parametric Network for 3D point cloud analysis, Point-NN, which consists of purely non-learnable components: farthest point sampling (FPS), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), and pooling operations, with trigonometric functions. Surprisingly, it performs well on various 3D tasks, requiring no parameters or training, and even surpasses existing fully trained models. Starting from this basic non-parametric model, we propose two extensions. First, Point-NN can serve as a base architectural framework to construct Parametric Networks by simply inserting linear layers on top. Given the superior non-parametric foundation, the derived Point-PN exhibits a high performance-efficiency trade-off with only a few learnable parameters. Second, Point-NN can be regarded as a plug-and-play module for the already trained 3D models during inference. Point-NN captures the complementary geometric knowledge and enhances existing methods for different 3D benchmarks without re-training. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for understanding 3D point clouds with non-parametric methods. Code is available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/Point-NN.

LiDAR-based 3D point cloud recognition has benefited various applications. Without specially considering the LiDAR point distribution, most current methods suffer from information disconnection and limited receptive field, especially for the sparse distant points. In this work, we study the varying-sparsity distribution of LiDAR points and present SphereFormer to directly aggregate information from dense close points to the sparse distant ones. We design radial window self-attention that partitions the space into multiple non-overlapping narrow and long windows. It overcomes the disconnection issue and enlarges the receptive field smoothly and dramatically, which significantly boosts the performance of sparse distant points. Moreover, to fit the narrow and long windows, we propose exponential splitting to yield fine-grained position encoding and dynamic feature selection to increase model representation ability. Notably, our method ranks 1st on both nuScenes and SemanticKITTI semantic segmentation benchmarks with 81.9% and 74.8% mIoU, respectively. Also, we achieve the 3rd place on nuScenes object detection benchmark with 72.8% NDS and 68.5% mAP. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/SphereFormer.git.

LiDAR-based perception is a central component of autonomous driving, playing a key role in tasks such as vehicle localization and obstacle detection. Since the safety of LiDAR-based perceptual pipelines is critical to safe autonomous driving, a number of past efforts have investigated its vulnerability under adversarial perturbations of raw point cloud inputs. However, most such efforts have focused on investigating the impact of such perturbations on predictions (integrity), and little has been done to understand the impact on latency (availability), a critical concern for real-time cyber-physical systems. We present the first systematic investigation of the availability of LiDAR detection pipelines, and SlowLiDAR, an adversarial perturbation attack that maximizes LiDAR detection runtime. The attack overcomes the technical challenges posed by the non-differentiable parts of the LiDAR detection pipelines by using differentiable proxies and uses a novel loss function that effectively captures the impact of adversarial perturbations on the execution time of the pipeline. Extensive experimental results show that SlowLiDAR can significantly increase the latency of the six most popular LiDAR detection pipelines while maintaining imperceptibility.

A good motion retargeting cannot be reached without reasonable consideration of source-target differences on both the skeleton and shape geometry levels. In this work, we propose a novel Residual RETargeting network (R2ET) structure, which relies on two neural modification modules, to adjust the source motions to fit the target skeletons and shapes progressively. In particular, a skeleton-aware module is introduced to preserve the source motion semantics. A shape-aware module is designed to perceive the geometries of target characters to reduce interpenetration and contact-missing. Driven by our explored distance-based losses that explicitly model the motion semantics and geometry, these two modules can learn residual motion modifications on the source motion to generate plausible retargeted motion in a single inference without post-processing. To balance these two modifications, we further present a balancing gate to conduct linear interpolation between them. Extensive experiments on the public dataset Mixamo demonstrate that our R2ET achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and provides a good balance between the preservation of motion semantics as well as the attenuation of interpenetration and contact-missing. Code is available at https://github.com/Kebii/R2ET.

With the success of the 3D deep learning models, various perception technologies for autonomous driving have been developed in the LiDAR domain. While these models perform well in the trained source domain, they struggle in unseen domains with a domain gap. In this paper, we propose a single domain generalization method for LiDAR semantic segmentation (DGLSS) that aims to ensure good performance not only in the source domain but also in the unseen domain by learning only on the source domain. We mainly focus on generalizing from a dense source domain and target the domain shift from different LiDAR sensor configurations and scene distributions. To this end, we augment the domain to simulate the unseen domains by randomly subsampling the LiDAR scans. With the augmented domain, we introduce two constraints for generalizable representation learning: sparsity invariant feature consistency (SIFC) and semantic correlation consistency (SCC). The SIFC aligns sparse internal features of the source domain with the augmented domain based on the feature affinity. For SCC, we constrain the correlation between class prototypes to be similar for every LiDAR scan. We also establish a standardized training and evaluation setting for DGLSS. With the proposed evaluation setting, our method showed improved performance in the unseen domains compared to other baselines. Even without access to the target domain, our method performed better than the domain adaptation method. The code is available at https://github.com/gzgzys9887/DGLSS.

LiDAR-based absolute pose regression estimates the global pose through a deep network in an end-to-end manner, achieving impressive results in learning-based localization. However, the accuracy of existing methods still has room to improve due to the difficulty of effectively encoding the scene geometry and the unsatisfactory quality of the data. In this work, we propose a novel LiDAR localization framework, SGLoc, which decouples the pose estimation to point cloud correspondence regression and pose estimation via this correspondence. This decoupling effectively encodes the scene geometry because the decoupled correspondence regression step greatly preserves the scene geometry, leading to significant performance improvement. Apart from this decoupling, we also design a tri-scale spatial feature aggregation module and inter-geometric consistency constraint loss to effectively capture scene geometry. Moreover, we empirically find that the ground truth might be noisy due to GPS/INS measuring errors, greatly reducing the pose estimation performance. Thus, we propose a pose quality evaluation and enhancement method to measure and correct the ground truth pose. Extensive experiments on the Oxford Radar RobotCar and NCLT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SGLoc, which outperforms state-of-the-art regression-based localization methods by 68.5% and 67.6% on position accuracy, respectively.

Training deep models for semantic scene completion is challenging due to the sparse and incomplete input, a large quantity of objects of diverse scales as well as the inherent label noise for moving objects. To address the above-mentioned problems, we propose the following three solutions: 1) Redesigning the completion network. We design a novel completion network, which consists of several Multi-Path Blocks (MPBs) to aggregate multi-scale features and is free from the lossy downsampling operations. 2) Distilling rich knowledge from the multi-frame model. We design a novel knowledge distillation objective, dubbed Dense-to-Sparse Knowledge Distillation (DSKD). It transfers the dense, relation-based semantic knowledge from the multi-frame teacher to the single-frame student, significantly improving the representation learning of the single-frame model. 3) Completion label rectification. We propose a simple yet effective label rectification strategy, which uses off-the-shelf panoptic segmentation labels to remove the traces of dynamic objects in completion labels, greatly improving the performance of deep models especially for those moving objects. Extensive experiments are conducted in two public semantic scene completion benchmarks, i.e., SemanticKITTI and SemanticPOSS. Our SCPNet ranks 1st on SemanticKITTI semantic scene completion challenge and surpasses the competitive S3CNet by 7.2 mIoU. SCPNet also outperforms previous completion algorithms on the SemanticPOSS dataset. Besides, our method also achieves competitive results on SemanticKITTI semantic segmentation tasks, showing that knowledge learned in the scene completion is beneficial to the segmentation task.

The intrinsic rotation invariance lies at the core of matching point clouds with handcrafted descriptors. However, it is widely despised by recent deep matchers that obtain the rotation invariance extrinsically via data augmentation. As the finite number of augmented rotations can never span the continuous SO(3) space, these methods usually show instability when facing rotations that are rarely seen. To this end, we introduce RoITr, a Rotation-Invariant Transformer to cope with the pose variations in the point cloud matching task. We contribute both on the local and global levels. Starting from the local level, we introduce an attention mechanism embedded with Point Pair Feature (PPF)-based coordinates to describe the pose-invariant geometry, upon which a novel attention-based encoder-decoder architecture is constructed. We further propose a global transformer with rotation-invariant cross-frame spatial awareness learned by the self-attention mechanism, which significantly improves the feature distinctiveness and makes the model robust with respect to the low overlap. Experiments are conducted on both the rigid and non-rigid public benchmarks, where RoITr outperforms all the state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin in the low-overlapping scenarios. Especially when the rotations are enlarged on the challenging 3DLoMatch benchmark, RoITr surpasses the existing methods by at least 13 and 5 percentage points in terms of Inlier Ratio and Registration Recall, respectively.

Most existing approaches for point cloud normal estimation aim to locally fit a geometric surface and calculate the normal from the fitted surface. Recently, learning-based methods have adopted a routine of predicting point-wise weights to solve the weighted least-squares surface fitting problem. Despite achieving remarkable progress, these methods overlook the approximation error of the fitting problem, resulting in a less accurate fitted surface. In this paper, we first carry out in-depth analysis of the approximation error in the surface fitting problem. Then, in order to bridge the gap between estimated and precise surface normals, we present two basic design principles: 1) applies the Z-direction Transform to rotate local patches for a better surface fitting with a lower approximation error; 2) models the error of the normal estimation as a learnable term. We implement these two principles using deep neural networks, and integrate them with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) normal estimation methods in a plug-and-play manner. Extensive experiments verify our approaches bring benefits to point cloud normal estimation and push the frontier of state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/hikvision-research/3DVision.

Problems such as equipment defects or limited viewpoints will lead the captured point clouds to be incomplete. Therefore, recovering the complete point clouds from the partial ones plays an vital role in many practical tasks, and one of the keys lies in the prediction of the missing part. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud completion approach namely ProxyFormer that divides point clouds into existing (input) and missing (to be predicted) parts and each part communicates information through its proxies. Specifically, we fuse information into point proxy via feature and position extractor, and generate features for missing point proxies from the features of existing point proxies. Then, in order to better perceive the position of missing points, we design a missing part sensitive transformer, which converts random normal distribution into reasonable position information, and uses proxy alignment to refine the missing proxies. It makes the predicted point proxies more sensitive to the features and positions of the missing part, and thus makes these proxies more suitable for subsequent coarse-to-fine processes. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art completion networks on several benchmark datasets and has the fastest inference speed.

In this work, we show that it is feasible to perform multiple tasks concurrently on point cloud with a straightforward yet effective multi-task network. Our framework, Poly-PC, tackles the inherent obstacles (e.g., different model architectures caused by task bias and conflicting gradients caused by multiple dataset domains, etc.) of multi-task learning on point cloud. Specifically, we propose a residual set abstraction (Res-SA) layer for efficient and effective scaling in both width and depth of the network, hence accommodating the needs of various tasks. We develop a weight-entanglement-based one-shot NAS technique to find optimal architectures for all tasks. Moreover, such technique entangles the weights of multiple tasks in each layer to offer task-shared parameters for efficient storage deployment while providing ancillary task-specific parameters for learning task-related features. Finally, to facilitate the training of Poly-PC, we introduce a task-prioritization-based gradient balance algorithm that leverages task prioritization to reconcile conflicting gradients, ensuring high performance for all tasks. Benefiting from the suggested techniques, models optimized by Poly-PC collectively for all tasks keep fewer total FLOPs and parameters and outperform previous methods. We also demonstrate that Poly-PC allows incremental learning and evades catastrophic forgetting when tuned to a new task.

We propose a novel method that renders point clouds as if they are surfaces. The proposed method is differentiable and requires no scene-specific optimization. This unique capability enables, out-of-the-box, surface normal estimation, rendering room-scale point clouds, inverse rendering, and ray tracing with global illumination. Unlike existing work that focuses on converting point clouds to other representations--e.g., surfaces or implicit functions--our key idea is to directly infer the intersection of a light ray with the underlying surface represented by the given point cloud. Specifically, we train a set transformer that, given a small number of local neighbor points along a light ray, provides the intersection point, the surface normal, and the material blending weights, which are used to render the outcome of this light ray. Localizing the problem into small neighborhoods enables us to train a model with only 48 meshes and apply it to unseen point clouds. Our model achieves higher estimation accuracy than state-of-the-art surface reconstruction and point-cloud rendering methods on three test sets. When applied to room-scale point clouds, without any scene-specific optimization, the model achieves competitive quality with the state-of-the-art novel-view rendering methods. Moreover, we demonstrate ability to render and manipulate Lidar-scanned point clouds such as lighting control and object insertion.

In point cloud analysis, point-based methods have rapidly developed in recent years. These methods have recently focused on concise MLP structures, such as PointNeXt, which have demonstrated competitiveness with Convolutional and Transformer structures. However, standard MLPs are limited in their ability to extract local features effectively. To address this limitation, we propose a Vector-oriented Point Set Abstraction that can aggregate neighboring features through higher-dimensional vectors. To facilitate network optimization, we construct a transformation from scalar to vector using independent angles based on 3D vector rotations. Finally, we develop a PointVector model that follows the structure of PointNeXt. Our experimental results demonstrate that PointVector achieves state-of-the-art performance 72.3% mIOU on the S3DIS Area 5 and 78.4% mIOU on the S3DIS (6-fold cross-validation) with only 58% model parameters of PointNeXt. We hope our work will help the exploration of concise and effective feature representations. The code will be released soon.

Deep neural networks on regular 1D lists (e.g., natural languages) and irregular 3D sets (e.g., point clouds) have made tremendous achievements. The key to natural language processing is to model words and their regular order dependency in texts. For point cloud understanding, the challenge is to understand the geometry via irregular point coordinates, in which point-feeding orders do not matter. However, there are a few kinds of data that exhibit both regular 1D list and irregular 3D set structures, such as proteins and non-coding RNAs. In this paper, we refer to them as 3D point lists and propose a Transformer-style PointListNet to model them. First, PointListNet employs non-parametric distance-based attention because we find sometimes it is the distance, instead of the feature or type, that mainly determines how much two points, e.g., amino acids, are correlated in the micro world. Second, different from the vanilla Transformer that directly performs a simple linear transformation on inputs to generate values and does not explicitly model relative relations, our PointListNet integrates the 1D order and 3D Euclidean displacements into values. We conduct experiments on protein fold classification and enzyme reaction classification. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed PointListNet.