PCT: Perspective Cue Training Framework for Multi-Camera BEV Segmentation

Generating annotations for bird's-eye-view (BEV) segmentation presents significant challenges due to the scenes' complexity and the high manual annotation cost. In this work, we address these challenges by leveraging the abundance of unlabeled data available. We propose the Perspective Cue Training (PCT) framework, a novel training framework that utilizes pseudo-labels generated from unlabeled perspective images using publicly available semantic segmentation models trained on large street-view datasets. PCT applies a perspective view task head to the image encoder shared with the BEV segmentation head, effectively utilizing the unlabeled data to be trained with the generated pseudo-labels. Since image encoders are present in nearly all camera-based BEV segmentation architectures, PCT is flexible and applicable to various existing BEV architectures. PCT can be applied to various settings where unlabeled data is available. In this paper, we applied PCT for semi-supervised learning (SSL) and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Additionally, we introduce strong input perturbation through Camera Dropout (CamDrop) and feature perturbation via BEV Feature Dropout (BFD), which are crucial for enhancing SSL capabilities using our teacher-student framework. Our comprehensive approach is simple and flexible but yields significant improvements over various baselines for SSL and UDA, achieving competitive performances even against the current state-of-the-art.
Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures; Accepted to IROS 2024