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Interest in cooperative perception is growing quickly due to its remarkable performance in improving perception capabilities for connected and automated vehicles. This improvement is crucial, especially for automated driving scenarios in which perception performance is one of the main bottlenecks to the development of safety and efficiency. However, current cooperative perception methods typically assume that all collaborating vehicles have enough communication bandwidth to share all features with an identical spatial size, which is impractical for real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Cooperative Perception, a new cooperative perception framework that is not limited by the aforementioned assumptions, aiming to enable cooperative perception under more realistic and challenging conditions. To support this, a novel feature encoder is proposed and named Pillar Attention Encoder. A pillar attention mechanism is designed to extract the feature data while considering its significance for the perception task. An adaptive feature filter is proposed to adjust the size of the feature data for sharing by considering the importance value of the feature. Experiments are conducted for cooperative object detection from multiple vehicle-based and infrastructure-based LiDAR sensors under various communication conditions. Results demonstrate that our method can successfully handle dynamic communication conditions and improve the mean Average Precision by 10.18% when compared with the state-of-the-art feature encoder.
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Enhanced Cooperative Perception for Autonomous Vehicles Using Imperfect Communication
Sharing and joint processing of camera feeds and sensor measurements, known as Cooperative Perception (CP), has emerged as a new technique to achieve higher perception qualities. CP can enhance the safety of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) where their individual visual perception quality is compromised by adverse weather conditions (haze as foggy weather), low illumination, winding roads, and crowded traffic. While previous CP methods have shown success in elevating perception quality, they often assume perfect communication conditions and unlimited transmission resources to share camera feeds, which may not hold in real-world scenarios. Also, they make no effort to select better helpers when multiple options are available.To cover the limitations of former methods, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to realize an optimized CP under constrained communications. At the core of our approach is recruiting the best helper from the available list of front vehicles to augment the visual range and enhance the Object Detection (OD) accuracy of the ego vehicle. In this two-step process, we first select the helper vehicles that contribute the most to CP based on their visual range and lowest motion blur. Next, we implement a radio block optimization among the candidate vehicles to further improve communication efficiency. We specifically focus on pedestrian detection as an exemplary scenario. To validate our approach, we used the CARLA simulator to create a dataset of annotated videos for different driving scenarios where pedestrian detection is challenging for an AV with compromised vision. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of our two-step optimization process in improving the overall performance of cooperative perception in challenging scenarios, substantially improving driving safety under adverse conditions. Finally, we note that the networking assumptions are adopted from LTE Release 14 Mode 4 side-link communication, commonly used for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) commun
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- Award ID(s):
- 2204721
- PAR ID:
- 10542199
- Publisher / Repository:
- 2024 20th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT)
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-6944-1
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 700 to 707
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/DCOSS-IoT61029.2024.00108
