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Along with the rapid growth of autonomous vehicles (AVs), more and more demands are required for environment perception technology. Among others, HD mapping has become one of the more prominent roles in helping the vehicle realize essential tasks such as localization and path planning. While increasing research efforts have been directed toward HD Map development. However, a comprehensive overview of the overall HD map mapping and update framework is still lacking. This article introduces the development and current state of the algorithm involved in creating HD map mapping and its maintenance. As part of this study, the primary data preprocessing approach of processing raw data to information ready to feed for mapping and update purposes, semantic segmentation, and localization are also briefly reviewed. Moreover, the map taxonomy, ontology, and quality assessment are extensively discussed, the map data's general representation method is presented, and the mapping algorithm ranging from SLAM to transformers learning-based approaches are also discussed. The development of the HD map update algorithm, from change detection to the update methods, is also presented. Finally, the authors discuss possible future developments and the remaining challenges in HD map mapping and update technology. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those new to HD map mapping and update domains., Comment: 30 Pages, 13 figures

Generating city-scale lane-level maps faces significant challenges due to the intricate urban environments, such as blurred or absent lane markings. Additionally, a standard lane-level map requires a comprehensive organization of lane groupings, encompassing lane direction, style, boundary, and topology, yet has not been thoroughly examined in prior research. These obstacles result in labor-intensive human annotation and high maintenance costs. This paper overcomes these limitations and presents an industrial-grade solution named DuMapNet that outputs standardized, vectorized map elements and their topology in an end-to-end paradigm. To this end, we propose a group-wise lane prediction (GLP) system that outputs vectorized results of lane groups by meticulously tailoring a transformer-based network. Meanwhile, to enhance generalization in challenging scenarios, such as road wear and occlusions, as well as to improve global consistency, a contextual prompts encoder (CPE) module is proposed, which leverages the predicted results of spatial neighborhoods as contextual information. Extensive experiments conducted on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of DuMapNet. Additionally, DuMap-Net has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps since June 2023, supporting lane-level map generation tasks for over 360 cities while bringing a 95% reduction in costs. This demonstrates that DuMapNet serves as a practical and cost-effective industrial solution for city-scale lane-level map generation., Comment: Accepted by KDD 2024, camera-ready version

3D occupancy prediction (Occ) is a rapidly rising challenging perception task in the field of autonomous driving which represents the driving scene as uniformly partitioned 3D voxel grids with semantics. Compared to 3D object detection, grid perception has great advantage of better recognizing irregularly shaped, unknown category, or partially occluded general objects. However, existing 3D occupancy networks (occnets) are both computationally heavy and label-hungry. In terms of model complexity, occnets are commonly composed of heavy Conv3D modules or transformers on the voxel level. In terms of label annotations requirements, occnets are supervised with large-scale expensive dense voxel labels. Model and data inefficiency, caused by excessive network parameters and label annotations requirement, severely hinder the onboard deployment of occnets. This paper proposes an efficient 3d occupancy network (EFFOcc), that targets the minimal network complexity and label requirement while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy. EFFOcc only uses simple 2D operators, and improves Occ accuracy to the state-of-the-art on multiple large-scale benchmarks: Occ3D-nuScenes, Occ3D-Waymo, and OpenOccupancy-nuScenes. On Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark, EFFOcc has only 18.4M parameters, and achieves 50.46 in terms of mean IoU (mIoU), to our knowledge, it is the occnet with minimal parameters compared with related occnets. Moreover, we propose a two-stage active learning strategy to reduce the requirements of labelled data. Active EFFOcc trained with 6\% labelled voxels achieves 47.19 mIoU, which is 95.7% fully supervised performance. The proposed EFFOcc also supports improved vision-only occupancy prediction with the aid of region-decomposed distillation. Code and demo videos will be available at https://github.com/synsin0/EFFOcc., Comment: preprint under review

Vision-centric occupancy networks, which represent the surrounding environment with uniform voxels with semantics, have become a new trend for safe driving of camera-only autonomous driving perception systems, as they are able to detect obstacles regardless of their shape and occlusion. Modern occupancy networks mainly focus on reconstructing visible voxels from object surfaces with voxel-wise semantic prediction. Usually, they suffer from inconsistent predictions of one object and mixed predictions for adjacent objects. These confusions may harm the safety of downstream planning modules. To this end, we investigate panoptic segmentation on 3D voxel scenarios and propose an instance-aware occupancy network, PanoSSC. We predict foreground objects and backgrounds separately and merge both in post-processing. For foreground instance grouping, we propose a novel 3D instance mask decoder that can efficiently extract individual objects. we unify geometric reconstruction, 3D semantic segmentation, and 3D instance segmentation into PanoSSC framework and propose new metrics for evaluating panoptic voxels. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive results on SemanticKITTI semantic scene completion benchmark., Comment: 3dv2024

Constructing high-definition (HD) maps is a crucial requirement for enabling autonomous driving. In recent years, several map segmentation algorithms have been developed to address this need, leveraging advancements in Bird's-Eye View (BEV) perception. However, existing models still encounter challenges in producing realistic and consistent semantic map layouts. One prominent issue is the limited utilization of structured priors inherent in map segmentation masks. In light of this, we propose DiffMap, a novel approach specifically designed to model the structured priors of map segmentation masks using latent diffusion model. By incorporating this technique, the performance of existing semantic segmentation methods can be significantly enhanced and certain structural errors present in the segmentation outputs can be effectively rectified. Notably, the proposed module can be seamlessly integrated into any map segmentation model, thereby augmenting its capability to accurately delineate semantic information. Furthermore, through extensive visualization analysis, our model demonstrates superior proficiency in generating results that more accurately reflect real-world map layouts, further validating its efficacy in improving the quality of the generated maps.

The worldwide adoption of machine learning (ML) and deep learning models, particularly in critical sectors, such as healthcare and finance, presents substantial challenges in maintaining individual privacy and fairness. These two elements are vital to a trustworthy environment for learning systems. While numerous studies have concentrated on protecting individual privacy through differential privacy (DP) mechanisms, emerging research indicates that differential privacy in machine learning models can unequally impact separate demographic subgroups regarding prediction accuracy. This leads to a fairness concern, and manifests as biased performance. Although the prevailing view is that enhancing privacy intensifies fairness disparities, a smaller, yet significant, subset of research suggests the opposite view. In this article, with extensive evaluation results, we demonstrate that the impact of differential privacy on fairness is not monotonous. Instead, we observe that the accuracy disparity initially grows as more DP noise (enhanced privacy) is added to the ML process, but subsequently diminishes at higher privacy levels with even more noise. Moreover, implementing gradient clipping in the differentially private stochastic gradient descent ML method can mitigate the negative impact of DP noise on fairness. This mitigation is achieved by moderating the disparity growth through a lower clipping threshold.

High-precision vehicle localization with commercial setups is a crucial technique for high-level autonomous driving tasks. Localization with a monocular camera in LiDAR map is a newly emerged approach that achieves promising balance between cost and accuracy, but estimating pose by finding correspondences between such cross-modal sensor data is challenging, thereby damaging the localization accuracy. In this paper, we address the problem by proposing a novel Transformer-based neural network to register 2D images into 3D LiDAR map in an end-to-end manner. Poses are implicitly represented as high-dimensional feature vectors called pose queries and can be iteratively updated by interacting with the retrieved relevant information from cross-model features using attention mechanism in a proposed POse Estimator Transformer (POET) module. Moreover, we apply a multiple hypotheses aggregation method that estimates the final poses by performing parallel optimization on multiple randomly initialized pose queries to reduce the network uncertainty. Comprehensive analysis and experimental results on public benchmark conclude that the proposed image-to-LiDAR map localization network could achieve state-of-the-art performances in challenging cross-modal localization tasks., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables

Grid-centric perception is a crucial field for mobile robot perception and navigation. Nonetheless, grid-centric perception is less prevalent than object-centric perception as autonomous vehicles need to accurately perceive highly dynamic, large-scale traffic scenarios and the complexity and computational costs of grid-centric perception are high. In recent years, the rapid development of deep learning techniques and hardware provides fresh insights into the evolution of grid-centric perception. The fundamental difference between grid-centric and object-centric pipeline lies in that grid-centric perception follows a geometry-first paradigm which is more robust to the open-world driving scenarios with endless long-tailed semantically-unknown obstacles. Recent researches demonstrate the great advantages of grid-centric perception, such as comprehensive fine-grained environmental representation, greater robustness to occlusion and irregular shaped objects, better ground estimation, and safer planning policies. There is also a growing trend that the capacity of occupancy networks are greatly expanded to 4D scene perception and prediction and latest techniques are highly related to new research topics such as 4D occupancy forecasting, generative AI and world models in the field of autonomous driving. Given the lack of current surveys for this rapidly expanding field, we present a hierarchically-structured review of grid-centric perception for autonomous vehicles. We organize previous and current knowledge of occupancy grid techniques along the main vein from 2D BEV grids to 3D occupancy to 4D occupancy forecasting. We additionally summarize label-efficient occupancy learning and the role of grid-centric perception in driving systems. Lastly, we present a summary of the current research trend and provide future outlooks.

Predicting the future occupancy states of the surrounding environment is a vital task for autonomous driving. However, current best-performing single-modality methods or multi-modality fusion perception methods are only able to predict uniform snapshots of future occupancy states and require strictly synchronized sensory data for sensor fusion. We propose a novel framework, StreamingFlow, to lift these strong limitations. StreamingFlow is a novel BEV occupancy predictor that ingests asynchronous multi-sensor data streams for fusion and performs streaming forecasting of the future occupancy map at any future timestamps. By integrating neural ordinary differential equations (N-ODE) into recurrent neural networks, StreamingFlow learns derivatives of BEV features over temporal horizons, updates the implicit sensor's BEV features as part of the fusion process, and propagates BEV states to the desired future time point. It shows good zero-shot generalization ability of prediction, reflected in the interpolation of the observed prediction time horizon and the reasonable inference of the unseen farther future period. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, nuScenes and Lyft L5, demonstrate that StreamingFlow significantly outperforms previous vision-based, LiDAR-based methods, and shows superior performance compared to state-of-the-art fusion-based methods., Comment: cvpr2024 poster (highlight), code at https://github.com/synsin0/StreamingFlow

The idea of cooperative perception is to benefit from shared perception data between multiple vehicles and overcome the limitations of on-board sensors on single vehicle. However, the fusion of multi-vehicle information is still challenging due to inaccurate localization, limited communication bandwidth and ambiguous fusion. Past practices simplify the problem by placing a precise GNSS localization system, manually specify the number of connected vehicles and determine the fusion strategy. This paper proposes a map-based cooperative perception framework, named map container, to improve the accuracy and robustness of cooperative perception, which ultimately overcomes this problem. The concept 'Map Container' denotes that the map serves as the platform to transform all information into the map coordinate space automatically and incorporate different sources of information in a distributed fusion architecture. In the proposed map container, the GNSS signal and the matching relationship between sensor feature and map feature are considered to optimize the estimation of environment states. Evaluation on simulation dataset and real-vehicle platform result validates the effectiveness of the proposed method., Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures

Environmental perception with the multi-modal fusion of radar and camera is crucial in autonomous driving to increase accuracy, completeness, and robustness. This paper focuses on utilizing millimeter-wave (MMW) radar and camera sensor fusion for 3D object detection. A novel method that realizes the feature-level fusion under the bird's-eye view (BEV) for a better feature representation is proposed. Firstly, radar points are augmented with temporal accumulation and sent to a spatial-temporal encoder for radar feature extraction. Meanwhile, multi-scale image 2D features which adapt to various spatial scales are obtained by image backbone and neck model. Then, image features are transformed to BEV with the designed view transformer. In addition, this work fuses the multi-modal features with a two-stage fusion model called point-fusion and ROI-fusion, respectively. Finally, a detection head regresses objects category and 3D locations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method realizes the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under the most crucial detection metrics-mean average precision (mAP) and nuScenes detection score (NDS) on the challenging nuScenes dataset., Comment: 12 pages,6 figures

In order to remain competitive, Internet companies collect and analyse user data for the purpose of improving user experiences. Frequency estimation is a widely used statistical tool which could potentially conflict with the relevant privacy regulations. Privacy preserving analytic methods based on differential privacy have been proposed, which either require a large user base or a trusted server; hence may give big companies an unfair advantage while handicapping smaller organizations in their growth opportunity. To address this issue, this paper proposes a fair privacy-preserving sampling-based frequency estimation method and provides a relation between its privacy guarantee, output accuracy, and number of participants. We designed decentralized privacy-preserving aggregation mechanisms using multi-party computation technique and established that, for a limited number of participants and a fixed privacy level, our mechanisms perform better than those that are based on traditional perturbation methods; hence, provide smaller companies a fair growth opportunity. We further propose an architectural model to support weighted aggregation in order to achieve higher accuracy estimate to cater for users with different privacy requirements. Compared to the unweighted aggregation, our method provides a more accurate estimate. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Crowdsourcing plays an essential role in the Internet of Things (IoT) for data collection, where a group of workers is equipped with Internet-connected geolocated devices to collect sensor data for marketing or research purpose. In this paper, we consider crowdsourcing these worker's hot travel path. Each worker is required to report his real-time location information, which is sensitive and has to be protected. Encryption-based methods are the most direct way to protect the location, but not suitable for resource-limited devices. Besides, local differential privacy is a strong privacy concept and has been deployed in many software systems. However, the local differential privacy technology needs a large number of participants to ensure the accuracy of the estimation, which is not always the case for crowdsourcing. To solve this problem, we proposed a trie-based iterative statistic method, which combines additive secret sharing and local differential privacy technologies. The proposed method has excellent performance even with a limited number of participants without the need of complex computation. Specifically, the proposed method contains three main components: iterative statistics, adaptive sampling, and secure reporting. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method and perform extensive experiments to show that the proposed method not only provides a strict privacy guarantee, but also significantly improves the performance from the previous existing solutions., Comment: This paper appears in IEEE Transactions on Services Computing. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2020.3039336

With the fast development of Information Technology, a tremendous amount of data have been generated and collected for research and analysis purposes. As an increasing number of users are growing concerned about their personal information, privacy preservation has become an urgent problem to be solved and has attracted significant attention. Local differential privacy (LDP), as a strong privacy tool, has been widely deployed in the real world in recent years. It breaks the shackles of the trusted third party, and allows users to perturb their data locally, thus providing much stronger privacy protection. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured overview of the local differential privacy technology. We summarise and analyze state-of-the-art research in LDP and compare a range of methods in the context of answering a variety of queries and training different machine learning models. We discuss the practical deployment of local differential privacy and explore its application in various domains. Furthermore, we point out several research gaps, and discuss promising future research directions., Comment: 24 pages

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a promising branch of the Internet of Things. IoV simulates a large variety of crowdsourcing applications such as Waze, Uber, and Amazon Mechanical Turk, etc. Users of these applications report the real-time traffic information to the cloud server which trains a machine learning model based on traffic information reported by users for intelligent traffic management. However, crowdsourcing application owners can easily infer users' location information, which raises severe location privacy concerns of the users. In addition, as the number of vehicles increases, the frequent communication between vehicles and the cloud server incurs unexpected amount of communication cost. To avoid the privacy threat and reduce the communication cost, in this paper, we propose to integrate federated learning and local differential privacy (LDP) to facilitate the crowdsourcing applications to achieve the machine learning model. Specifically, we propose four LDP mechanisms to perturb gradients generated by vehicles. The Three-Outputs mechanism is proposed which introduces three different output possibilities to deliver a high accuracy when the privacy budget is small. The output possibilities of Three-Outputs can be encoded with two bits to reduce the communication cost. Besides, to maximize the performance when the privacy budget is large, an optimal piecewise mechanism (PM-OPT) is proposed. We further propose a suboptimal mechanism (PM-SUB) with a simple formula and comparable utility to PM-OPT. Then, we build a novel hybrid mechanism by combining Three-Outputs and PM-SUB., Comment: This paper appears in IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J)

Least-squares reverse time migration is well-known for its capability to generate artifact-free true-amplitude subsurface images through fitting observed data in the least-squares sense. However, when applied to realistic imaging problems, this approach is faced with issues related to overfitting and excessive computational costs induced by many wave-equation solves. The fact that the source function is unknown complicates this situation even further. Motivated by recent results in stochastic optimization and transform-domain sparsity-promotion, we demonstrate that the computational costs of inversion can be reduced significantly while avoiding imaging artifacts and restoring amplitudes. While powerful, these new approaches do require accurate information on the source-time function, which is often lacking. Without this information, the imaging quality deteriorates rapidly. We address this issue by presenting an approach where the source-time function is estimated on the fly through a technique known as variable projection. Aside from introducing negligible computational overhead, the proposed method is shown to perform well on imaging problems with noisy data and problems that involve complex settings such as salt. In either case, the presented method produces high resolution high-amplitude fidelity images including an estimates for the source-time function. In addition, due to its use of stochastic optimization, we arrive at these images at roughly one to two times the cost of conventional reverse time migration involving all data.

Local differential privacy (LDP) has received much interest recently. In existing protocols with LDP guarantees, a user encodes and perturbs his data locally before sharing it to the aggregator. In common practice, however, users would prefer not to answer all the questions due to different privacy-preserving preferences for different questions, which leads to data missing or the loss of data quality. In this paper, we demonstrate a new approach for addressing the challenges of data perturbation with consideration of users' privacy preferences. Specifically, we first propose BiSample: a bidirectional sampling technique value perturbation in the framework of LDP. Then we combine the BiSample mechanism with users' privacy preferences for missing data perturbation. Theoretical analysis and experiments on a set of datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms., Comment: This paper appears as a full paper in the Proceedings of 25th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2020)

Insulating antiferromagnets are efficient and robust conductors of spin current. To realise the full potential of these materials within spintronics, the outstanding challenges are to demonstrate scalability down to nanometric lengthscales and the transmission of coherent spin currents. Here, we report the coherent transfer of spin angular momentum by excitation of evanescent spin waves of GHz frequency within antiferromagnetic NiO at room temperature. Using element-specific and phase-resolved x-ray ferromagnetic resonance, we probe the injection and transmission of ac spin current, and demonstrate that insertion of a few nanometre thick epitaxial NiO(001) layer between a ferromagnet and non-magnet can even enhance the flow of spin current. Our results pave the way towards coherent control of the phase and amplitude of spin currents at the nanoscale, and enable the realization of spin-logic devices and spin current amplifiers that operate at GHz and THz frequencies.