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Nov 21

CATS-V2V: A Real-World Vehicle-to-Vehicle Cooperative Perception Dataset with Complex Adverse Traffic Scenarios

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) cooperative perception has great potential to enhance autonomous driving performance by overcoming perception limitations in complex adverse traffic scenarios (CATS). Meanwhile, data serves as the fundamental infrastructure for modern autonomous driving AI. However, due to stringent data collection requirements, existing datasets focus primarily on ordinary traffic scenarios, constraining the benefits of cooperative perception. To address this challenge, we introduce CATS-V2V, the first-of-its-kind real-world dataset for V2V cooperative perception under complex adverse traffic scenarios. The dataset was collected by two hardware time-synchronized vehicles, covering 10 weather and lighting conditions across 10 diverse locations. The 100-clip dataset includes 60K frames of 10 Hz LiDAR point clouds and 1.26M multi-view 30 Hz camera images, along with 750K anonymized yet high-precision RTK-fixed GNSS and IMU records. Correspondingly, we provide time-consistent 3D bounding box annotations for objects, as well as static scenes to construct a 4D BEV representation. On this basis, we propose a target-based temporal alignment method, ensuring that all objects are precisely aligned across all sensor modalities. We hope that CATS-V2V, the largest-scale, most supportive, and highest-quality dataset of its kind to date, will benefit the autonomous driving community in related tasks.

4Seasons: Benchmarking Visual SLAM and Long-Term Localization for Autonomous Driving in Challenging Conditions

In this paper, we present a novel visual SLAM and long-term localization benchmark for autonomous driving in challenging conditions based on the large-scale 4Seasons dataset. The proposed benchmark provides drastic appearance variations caused by seasonal changes and diverse weather and illumination conditions. While significant progress has been made in advancing visual SLAM on small-scale datasets with similar conditions, there is still a lack of unified benchmarks representative of real-world scenarios for autonomous driving. We introduce a new unified benchmark for jointly evaluating visual odometry, global place recognition, and map-based visual localization performance which is crucial to successfully enable autonomous driving in any condition. The data has been collected for more than one year, resulting in more than 300 km of recordings in nine different environments ranging from a multi-level parking garage to urban (including tunnels) to countryside and highway. We provide globally consistent reference poses with up to centimeter-level accuracy obtained from the fusion of direct stereo-inertial odometry with RTK GNSS. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art visual odometry and visual localization baseline approaches on the benchmark and analyze their properties. The experimental results provide new insights into current approaches and show promising potential for future research. Our benchmark and evaluation protocols will be available at https://go.vision.in.tum.de/4seasons.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 31, 2022

TDoA-Based Self-Supervised Channel Charting with NLoS Mitigation

Channel Charting (CC) has emerged as a promising framework for data-driven radio localization, yet existing approaches often struggle to scale globally and to handle the distortions introduced by non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions. In this work, we propose a novel CC method that leverages Channel Impulse Response (CIR) data enriched with practical features such as Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) and Transmission Reception Point (TRP) locations, enabling a self-supervised localization function on a global scale. The proposed framework is further enhanced with short-interval User Equipment (UE) displacement measurements, which improve the continuity and robustness of the learned positioning function. Our algorithm incorporates a mechanism to identify and mask NLoS-induced noisy measurements, leading to significant performance gains. We present the evaluations of our proposed models in a real 5G testbed and benchmarked against centimeter-accurate Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning, in an O-RAN--based 5G network by OpenAirInterface (OAI) software at EURECOM. It demonstrated outperforming results against the state-of-the-art semi-supervised and self-supervised CC approaches in a real-world scenario. The results show localization accuracies of 2-4 meters in 90% of cases, across a range of NLoS ratios. Furthermore, we provide public datasets of CIR recordings, along with the true position labels used in this paper's evaluation.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 9

Towards Robust Sensor-Fusion Ground SLAM: A Comprehensive Benchmark and A Resilient Framework

Considerable advancements have been achieved in SLAM methods tailored for structured environments, yet their robustness under challenging corner cases remains a critical limitation. Although multi-sensor fusion approaches integrating diverse sensors have shown promising performance improvements, the research community faces two key barriers: On one hand, the lack of standardized and configurable benchmarks that systematically evaluate SLAM algorithms under diverse degradation scenarios hinders comprehensive performance assessment. While on the other hand, existing SLAM frameworks primarily focus on fusing a limited set of sensor types, without effectively addressing adaptive sensor selection strategies for varying environmental conditions. To bridge these gaps, we make three key contributions: First, we introduce M3DGR dataset: a sensor-rich benchmark with systematically induced degradation patterns including visual challenge, LiDAR degeneracy, wheel slippage and GNSS denial. Second, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of forty SLAM systems on M3DGR, providing critical insights into their robustness and limitations under challenging real-world conditions. Third, we develop a resilient modular multi-sensor fusion framework named Ground-Fusion++, which demonstrates robust performance by coupling GNSS, RGB-D, LiDAR, IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and wheel odometry. Codes and datasets are publicly available.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 11

STHN: Deep Homography Estimation for UAV Thermal Geo-localization with Satellite Imagery

Accurate geo-localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is crucial for outdoor applications including search and rescue operations, power line inspections, and environmental monitoring. The vulnerability of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals to interference and spoofing necessitates the development of additional robust localization methods for autonomous navigation. Visual Geo-localization (VG), leveraging onboard cameras and reference satellite maps, offers a promising solution for absolute localization. Specifically, Thermal Geo-localization (TG), which relies on image-based matching between thermal imagery with satellite databases, stands out by utilizing infrared cameras for effective nighttime localization. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of current TG approaches, are hindered by dense sampling on satellite maps and geometric noises in thermal query images. To overcome these challenges, we introduce STHN, a novel UAV thermal geo-localization approach that employs a coarse-to-fine deep homography estimation method. This method attains reliable thermal geo-localization within a 512-meter radius of the UAV's last known location even with a challenging 11\% size ratio between thermal and satellite images, despite the presence of indistinct textures and self-similar patterns. We further show how our research significantly enhances UAV thermal geo-localization performance and robustness against geometric noises under low-visibility conditions in the wild. The code is made publicly available.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30, 2024

Long-Range Vision-Based UAV-assisted Localization for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

The global positioning system (GPS) has become an indispensable navigation method for field operations with unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in marine environments. However, GPS may not always be available outdoors because it is vulnerable to natural interference and malicious jamming attacks. Thus, an alternative navigation system is required when the use of GPS is restricted or prohibited. To this end, we present a novel method that utilizes an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to assist in localizing USVs in GNSS-restricted marine environments. In our approach, the UAV flies along the shoreline at a consistent altitude, continuously tracking and detecting the USV using a deep learning-based approach on camera images. Subsequently, triangulation techniques are applied to estimate the USV's position relative to the UAV, utilizing geometric information and datalink range from the UAV. We propose adjusting the UAV's camera angle based on the pixel error between the USV and the image center throughout the localization process to enhance accuracy. Additionally, visual measurements are integrated into an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for robust state estimation. To validate our proposed method, we utilize a USV equipped with onboard sensors and a UAV equipped with a camera. A heterogeneous robotic interface is established to facilitate communication between the USV and UAV. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through a series of experiments conducted during the ``Muhammad Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge (MBZIRC-2024)'' in real marine environments, incorporating noisy measurements and ocean disturbances. The successful outcomes indicate the potential of our method to complement GPS for USV navigation.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 21, 2024

U-ViLAR: Uncertainty-Aware Visual Localization for Autonomous Driving via Differentiable Association and Registration

Accurate localization using visual information is a critical yet challenging task, especially in urban environments where nearby buildings and construction sites significantly degrade GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signal quality. This issue underscores the importance of visual localization techniques in scenarios where GNSS signals are unreliable. This paper proposes U-ViLAR, a novel uncertainty-aware visual localization framework designed to address these challenges while enabling adaptive localization using high-definition (HD) maps or navigation maps. Specifically, our method first extracts features from the input visual data and maps them into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space to enhance spatial consistency with the map input. Subsequently, we introduce: a) Perceptual Uncertainty-guided Association, which mitigates errors caused by perception uncertainty, and b) Localization Uncertainty-guided Registration, which reduces errors introduced by localization uncertainty. By effectively balancing the coarse-grained large-scale localization capability of association with the fine-grained precise localization capability of registration, our approach achieves robust and accurate localization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple localization tasks. Furthermore, our model has undergone rigorous testing on large-scale autonomous driving fleets and has demonstrated stable performance in various challenging urban scenarios.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 6