No Arabic abstract
Dashboard cameras capture a tremendous amount of driving scene video each day. These videos are purposefully coupled with vehicle sensing data, such as from the speedometer and inertial sensors, providing an additional sensing modality for free. In this work, we leverage the large-scale unlabeled yet naturally paired data for visual representation learning in the driving scenario. A representation is learned in an end-to-end self-supervised framework for predicting dense optical flow from a single frame with paired sensing data. We postulate that success on this task requires the network to learn semantic and geometric knowledge in the ego-centric view. For example, forecasting a future view to be seen from a moving vehicle requires an understanding of scene depth, scale, and movement of objects. We demonstrate that our learned representation can benefit other tasks that require detailed scene understanding and outperforms competing unsupervised representations on semantic segmentation.
Event-based cameras are dynamic vision sensors that can provide asynchronous measurements of changes in per-pixel brightness at a microsecond level. This makes them significantly faster than conventional frame-based cameras, and an appealing choice for high-speed navigation. While an interesting sensor modality, this asynchronous data poses a challenge for common machine learning techniques. In this paper, we present an event variational autoencoder for unsupervised representation learning from asynchronous event camera data. We show that it is feasible to learn compact representations from spatiotemporal event data to encode the context. Furthermore, we show that such pretrained representations can be beneficial for navigation, allowing for usage in reinforcement learning instead of end-to-end reward driven perception. We validate this framework of learning visuomotor policies by applying it to an obstacle avoidance scenario in simulation. We show that representations learnt from event data enable training fast control policies that can adapt to different control capacities, and demonstrate a higher degree of robustness than end-to-end learning from event images.
Human drivers produce a vast amount of data which could, in principle, be used to improve autonomous driving systems. Unfortunately, seemingly straightforward approaches for creating end-to-end driving models that map sensor data directly into driving actions are problematic in terms of interpretability, and typically have significant difficulty dealing with spurious correlations. Alternatively, we propose to use this kind of action-based driving data for learning representations. Our experiments show that an affordance-based driving model pre-trained with this approach can leverage a relatively small amount of weakly annotated imagery and outperform pure end-to-end driving models, while being more interpretable. Further, we demonstrate how this strategy outperforms previous methods based on learning inverse dynamics models as well as other methods based on heavy human supervision (ImageNet).
In this paper, we study learning generalized driving style representations from automobile GPS trip data. We propose a novel Autoencoder Regularized deep neural Network (ARNet) and a trip encoding framework trip2vec to learn drivers driving styles directly from GPS records, by combining supervised and unsupervised feature learning in a unified architecture. Experiments on a challenging driver number estimation problem and the driver identification problem show that ARNet can learn a good generalized driving style representation: It significantly outperforms existing methods and alternative architectures by reaching the least estimation error on average (0.68, less than one driver) and the highest identification accuracy (by at least 3% improvement) compared with traditional supervised learning methods.
Current perception models in autonomous driving have become notorious for greatly relying on a mass of annotated data to cover unseen cases and address the long-tail problem. On the other hand, learning from unlabeled large-scale collected data and incrementally self-training powerful recognition models have received increasing attention and may become the solutions of next-generation industry-level powerful and robust perception models in autonomous driving. However, the research community generally suffered from data inadequacy of those essential real-world scene data, which hampers the future exploration of fully/semi/self-supervised methods for 3D perception. In this paper, we introduce the ONCE (One millioN sCenEs) dataset for 3D object detection in the autonomous driving scenario. The ONCE dataset consists of 1 million LiDAR scenes and 7 million corresponding camera images. The data is selected from 144 driving hours, which is 20x longer than the largest 3D autonomous driving dataset available (e.g. nuScenes and Waymo), and it is collected across a range of different areas, periods and weather conditions. To facilitate future research on exploiting unlabeled data for 3D detection, we additionally provide a benchmark in which we reproduce and evaluate a variety of self-supervised and semi-supervised methods on the ONCE dataset. We conduct extensive analyses on those methods and provide valuable observations on their performance related to the scale of used data. Data, code, and more information are available at https://once-for-auto-driving.github.io/index.html.
Autonomous driving has attracted much attention over the years but turns out to be harder than expected, probably due to the difficulty of labeled data collection for model training. Self-supervised learning (SSL), which leverages unlabeled data only for representation learning, might be a promising way to improve model performance. Existing SSL methods, however, usually rely on the single-centric-object guarantee, which may not be applicable for multi-instance datasets such as street scenes. To alleviate this limitation, we raise two issues to solve: (1) how to define positive samples for cross-view consistency and (2) how to measure similarity in multi-instance circumstances. We first adopt an IoU threshold during random cropping to transfer global-inconsistency to local-consistency. Then, we propose two feature alignment methods to enable 2D feature maps for multi-instance similarity measurement. Additionally, we adopt intra-image clustering with self-attention for further mining intra-image similarity and translation-invariance. Experiments show that, when pre-trained on Waymo dataset, our method called Multi-instance Siamese Network (MultiSiam) remarkably improves generalization ability and achieves state-of-the-art transfer performance on autonomous driving benchmarks, including Cityscapes and BDD100K, while existing SSL counterparts like MoCo, MoCo-v2, and BYOL show significant performance drop. By pre-training on SODA10M, a large-scale autonomous driving dataset, MultiSiam exceeds the ImageNet pre-trained MoCo-v2, demonstrating the potential of domain-specific pre-training. Code will be available at https://github.com/KaiChen1998/MultiSiam.