Sensor Fusion

Rigorously testing autonomy systems is essential for making safe self-driving vehicles (SDV) a reality. It requires one to generate safety critical scenarios beyond what can be collected safely in the world, as many scenarios happen rarely on our roads. To accurately evaluate performance, we need to test the SDV on these scenarios in closed-loop, where the SDV and other actors interact with each other at each timestep. Previously recorded driving logs provide a rich resource to build these new scenarios from, but for closed loop evaluation, we need to modify the sensor data based on the new scene configuration and the SDV's decisions, as actors might be added or removed and the trajectories of existing actors and the SDV will differ from the original log. In this paper, we present UniSim, a neural sensor simulator that takes a single recorded log captured by a sensor-equipped vehicle and converts it into a realistic closed-loop multi-sensor simulation. UniSim builds neural feature grids to reconstruct both the static background and dynamic actors in the scene, and composites them together to simulate LiDAR and camera data at new viewpoints, with actors added or removed and at new placements. To better handle extrapolated views, we incorporate learnable priors for dynamic objects, and leverage a convolutional network to complete unseen regions. Our experiments show UniSim can simulate realistic sensor data with small domain gap on downstream tasks. With UniSim, we demonstrate, for the first time, closed-loop evaluation of an autonomy system on safety-critical scenarios as if it were in the real world.

We present a new multi-sensor dataset for multi-view 3D surface reconstruction. It includes registered RGB and depth data from sensors of different resolutions and modalities: smartphones, Intel RealSense, Microsoft Kinect, industrial cameras, and structured-light scanner. The scenes are selected to emphasize a diverse set of material properties challenging for existing algorithms. We provide around 1.4 million images of 107 different scenes acquired from 100 viewing directions under 14 lighting conditions. We expect our dataset will be useful for evaluation and training of 3D reconstruction algorithms and for related tasks. The dataset is available at skoltech3d.appliedai.tech.

Gait recognition is a biometric technology that identifies people by their walking patterns. The silhouettes-based method and the skeletons-based method are the two most popular approaches. However, the silhouette data are easily affected by clothing occlusion, and the skeleton data lack body shape information. To obtain a more robust and comprehensive gait representation for recognition, we propose a transformer-based gait recognition framework called MMGaitFormer, which effectively fuses and aggregates the spatial-temporal information from the skeletons and silhouettes. Specifically, a Spatial Fusion Module (SFM) and a Temporal Fusion Module (TFM) are proposed for effective spatial-level and temporal-level feature fusion, respectively. The SFM performs fine-grained body parts spatial fusion and guides the alignment of each part of the silhouette and each joint of the skeleton through the attention mechanism. The TFM performs temporal modeling through Cycle Position Embedding (CPE) and fuses temporal information of two modalities. Experiments demonstrate that our MMGaitFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on popular gait datasets. For the most challenging "CL" (i.e., walking in different clothes) condition in CASIA-B, our method achieves a rank-1 accuracy of 94.8%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art single-modal methods by a large margin.

LiDAR relocalization plays a crucial role in many fields, including robotics, autonomous driving, and computer vision. LiDAR-based retrieval from a database typically incurs high computation storage costs and can lead to globally inaccurate pose estimations if the database is too sparse. On the other hand, pose regression methods take images or point clouds as inputs and directly regress global poses in an end-to-end manner. They do not perform database matching and are more computationally efficient than retrieval techniques. We propose HypLiLoc, a new model for LiDAR pose regression. We use two branched backbones to extract 3D features and 2D projection features, respectively. We consider multi-modal feature fusion in both Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces to obtain more effective feature representations. Experimental results indicate that HypLiLoc achieves state-of-the-art performance in both outdoor and indoor datasets. We also conduct extensive ablation studies on the framework design, which demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-modal feature extraction and multi-space embedding. Our code is released at: https://github.com/sijieaaa/HypLiLoc

Federated learning has emerged as a promising distributed machine learning paradigm to preserve data privacy. One of the fundamental challenges of federated learning is that data samples across clients are usually not independent and identically distributed (non-IID), leading to slow convergence and severe performance drop of the aggregated global model. To facilitate model aggregation on non-IID data, it is desirable to infer the unknown global distributions without violating privacy protection policy. In this paper, we propose a novel data-agnostic distribution fusion based model aggregation method called FedFusion to optimize federated learning with non-IID local datasets, based on which the heterogeneous clients' data distributions can be represented by a global distribution of several virtual fusion components with different parameters and weights. We develop a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) method to learn the optimal parameters of the distribution fusion components based on limited statistical information extracted from the local models, and apply the derived distribution fusion model to optimize federated model aggregation with non-IID data. Extensive experiments based on various federated learning scenarios with real-world datasets show that FedFusion achieves significant performance improvement compared to the state-of-the-art.

Multi-modality (MM) image fusion aims to render fused images that maintain the merits of different modalities, e.g., functional highlight and detailed textures. To tackle the challenge in modeling cross-modality features and decomposing desirable modality-specific and modality-shared features, we propose a novel Correlation-Driven feature Decomposition Fusion (CDDFuse) network. Firstly, CDDFuse uses Restormer blocks to extract cross-modality shallow features. We then introduce a dual-branch Transformer-CNN feature extractor with Lite Transformer (LT) blocks leveraging long-range attention to handle low-frequency global features and Invertible Neural Networks (INN) blocks focusing on extracting high-frequency local information. A correlation-driven loss is further proposed to make the low-frequency features correlated while the high-frequency features uncorrelated based on the embedded information. Then, the LT-based global fusion and INN-based local fusion layers output the fused image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CDDFuse achieves promising results in multiple fusion tasks, including infrared-visible image fusion and medical image fusion. We also show that CDDFuse can boost the performance in downstream infrared-visible semantic segmentation and object detection in a unified benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/Zhaozixiang1228/MMIF-CDDFuse.

Integrating multiple sensors and addressing diverse tasks in an end-to-end algorithm are challenging yet critical topics for autonomous driving. To this end, we introduce BEVGuide, a novel Bird's Eye-View (BEV) representation learning framework, representing the first attempt to unify a wide range of sensors under direct BEV guidance in an end-to-end fashion. Our architecture accepts input from a diverse sensor pool, including but not limited to Camera, Lidar and Radar sensors, and extracts BEV feature embeddings using a versatile and general transformer backbone. We design a BEV-guided multi-sensor attention block to take queries from BEV embeddings and learn the BEV representation from sensor-specific features. BEVGuide is efficient due to its lightweight backbone design and highly flexible as it supports almost any input sensor configurations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves exceptional performance in BEV perception tasks with a diverse sensor set. Project page is at https://yunzeman.github.io/BEVGuide.