Collaborative Semantic Occupancy Prediction with Hybrid Feature Fusion in Connected Automated Vehicles

Rui Song, Chenwei Liang, Hu Cao, Zhiran Yan, Walter Zimmer, Markus Gross, Andreas Festag, Alois Knoll; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 17996-18006

Collaborative perception in automated vehicles leverages the exchange of information between agents aiming to elevate perception results. Previous camera-based collaborative 3D perception methods typically employ 3D bounding boxes or bird's eye views as representations of the environment. However these approaches fall short in offering a comprehensive 3D environmental prediction. To bridge this gap we introduce the first method for collaborative 3D semantic occupancy prediction. Particularly it improves local 3D semantic occupancy predictions by hybrid fusion of (i) semantic and occupancy task features and (ii) compressed orthogonal attention features shared between vehicles. Additionally due to the lack of a collaborative perception dataset designed for semantic occupancy prediction we augment a current collaborative perception dataset to include 3D collaborative semantic occupancy labels for a more robust evaluation. The experimental findings highlight that: (i) our collaborative semantic occupancy predictions excel above the results from single vehicles by over 30% and (ii) models anchored on semantic occupancy outpace state-of-the-art collaborative 3D detection techniques in subsequent perception applications showcasing enhanced accuracy and enriched semantic-awareness in road environments.