arXiv subjects

Daniel Watzenig

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel Watzenig.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

DinoRADE: Full Spectral Radar-Camera Fusion with Vision Foundation Model Features for Multi-class Object Detection in Adverse Weather

Reliable and weather-robust perception systems are essential for safe autonomous driving and typically employ multi-modal sensor configurations to achieve comprehensive environmental awareness. While recent automotive FMCW Radar-based approaches achieved remarkable performance on detection tasks in adverse weather conditions, they exhibited limitations in resolving fine-grained spatial details particularly critical for detecting smaller and vulnerable road users (VRUs). Furthermore, existing research has not adequately addressed VRU detection in adverse weather datasets such as K-Radar. We present DinoRADE, a Radar-centered detection pipeline that processes dense Radar tensors and aggregates vision features around transformed reference points in the camera perspective via deformable cross-attention. Vision features are provided by a DINOv3 Vision Foundation Model. We present a comprehensive performance evaluation on the K-Radar dataset in all weather conditions and are among the first to report detection performance individually for five object classes. Additionally, we compare our method with existing single-class detection approaches and outperform recent Radar-camera approaches by 12.1%. The code is available under https://github.com/chr-is-tof/RADE-Net.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

DTP-Attack: A decision-based black-box adversarial attack on trajectory prediction

Trajectory prediction systems are critical for autonomous vehicle safety, yet remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can cause catastrophic traffic behavior misinterpretations. Existing attack methods require white-box access with gradient information and rely on rigid physical constraints, limiting real-world applicability. We propose DTP-Attack, a decision-based black-box adversarial attack framework tailored for trajectory prediction systems. Our method operates exclusively on binary decision outputs without requiring model internals or gradients, making it practical for real-world scenarios. DTP-Attack employs a novel boundary walking algorithm that navigates adversarial regions without fixed constraints, naturally maintaining trajectory realism through proximity preservation. Unlike existing approaches, our method supports both intention misclassification attacks and prediction accuracy degradation. Extensive evaluation on nuScenes and Apolloscape datasets across state-of-the-art models including Trajectron++ and Grip++ demonstrates superior performance. DTP-Attack achieves 41 - 81% attack success rates for intention misclassification attacks that manipulate perceived driving maneuvers with perturbations below 0.45 m, and increases prediction errors by 1.9 - 4.2 for accuracy degradation. Our method consistently outperforms existing black-box approaches while maintaining high controllability and reliability across diverse scenarios. These results reveal fundamental vulnerabilities in current trajectory prediction systems, highlighting urgent needs for robust defenses in safety-critical autonomous driving applications.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

RADE-Net: Robust Attention Network for Radar-Only Object Detection in Adverse Weather

Automotive perception systems are obligated to meet high requirements. While optical sensors such as Camera and Lidar struggle in adverse weather conditions, Radar provides a more robust perception performance, effectively penetrating fog, rain, and snow. Since full Radar tensors have large data sizes and very few datasets provide them, most Radar-based approaches work with sparse point clouds or 2D projections, which can result in information loss. Additionally, deep learning methods show potential to extract richer and more dense features from low level Radar data and therefore significantly increase the perception performance. Therefore, we propose a 3D projection method for fast-Fourier-transformed 4D Range-Azimuth-Doppler-Elevation (RADE) tensors. Our method preserves rich Doppler and Elevation features while reducing the required data size for a single frame by 91.9% compared to a full tensor, thus achieving higher training and inference speed as well as lower model complexity. We introduce RADE-Net, a lightweight model tailored to 3D projections of the RADE tensor. The backbone enables exploitation of low-level and high-level cues of Radar tensors with spatial and channel-attention. The decoupled detection heads predict object center-points directly in the Range-Azimuth domain and regress rotated 3D bounding boxes from rich feature maps in the cartesian scene. We evaluate the model on scenes with multiple different road users and under various weather conditions on the large-scale K-Radar dataset and achieve a 16.7% improvement compared to their baseline, as well as 6.5% improvement over current Radar-only models. Additionally, we outperform several Lidar approaches in scenarios with adverse weather conditions. The code is available under https://github.com/chr-is-tof/RADE-Net.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Investigating Traffic Accident Detection Using Multimodal Large Language Models

Traffic safety remains a critical global concern, with timely and accurate accident detection essential for hazard reduction and rapid emergency response. Infrastructure-based vision sensors offer scalable and efficient solutions for continuous real-time monitoring, facilitating automated detection of accidents directly from captured images. This research investigates the zero-shot capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for detecting and describing traffic accidents using images from infrastructure cameras, thus minimizing reliance on extensive labeled datasets. Main contributions include: (1) Evaluation of MLLMs using the simulated DeepAccident dataset from CARLA, explicitly addressing the scarcity of diverse, realistic, infrastructure-based accident data through controlled simulations; (2) Comparative performance analysis between Gemini 1.5 and 2.0, Gemma 3 and Pixtral models in accident identification and descriptive capabilities without prior fine-tuning; and (3) Integration of advanced visual analytics, specifically YOLO for object detection, Deep SORT for multi-object tracking, and Segment Anything (SAM) for instance segmentation, into enhanced prompts to improve model accuracy and explainability. Key numerical results show Pixtral as the top performer with an F1-score of 0.71 and 83% recall, while Gemini models gained precision with enhanced prompts (e.g., Gemini 1.5 rose to 90%) but suffered notable F1 and recall losses. Gemma 3 offered the most balanced performance with minimal metric fluctuation. These findings demonstrate the substantial potential of integrating MLLMs with advanced visual analytics techniques, enhancing their applicability in real-world automated traffic monitoring systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

MAP: End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Map-Assisted Planning

In recent years, end-to-end autonomous driving has attracted increasing attention for its ability to jointly model perception, prediction, and planning within a unified framework. However, most existing approaches underutilize the online mapping module, leaving its potential to enhance trajectory planning largely untapped. This paper proposes MAP (Map-Assisted Planning), a novel map-assisted end-to-end trajectory planning framework. MAP explicitly integrates segmentation-based map features and the current ego status through a Plan-enhancing Online Mapping module, an Ego-status-guided Planning module, and a Weight Adapter based on current ego status. Experiments conducted on the DAIR-V2X-seq-SPD dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a 16.6% reduction in L2 displacement error, a 56.2% reduction in off-road rate, and a 44.5% improvement in overall score compared to the UniV2X baseline, even without post-processing. Furthermore, it achieves top ranking in Track 2 of the End-to-End Autonomous Driving through V2X Cooperation Challenge of MEIS Workshop @CVPR2025, outperforming the second-best model by 39.5% in terms of overall score. These results highlight the effectiveness of explicitly leveraging semantic map features in planning and suggest new directions for improving structure design in end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Our code is available at https://gitee.com/kymkym/map.git

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Vision Foundation Model Embedding-Based Semantic Anomaly Detection

Semantic anomalies are contextually invalid or unusual combinations of familiar visual elements that can cause undefined behavior and failures in system-level reasoning for autonomous systems. This work explores semantic anomaly detection by leveraging the semantic priors of state-of-the-art vision foundation models, operating directly on the image. We propose a framework that compares local vision embeddings from runtime images to a database of nominal scenarios in which the autonomous system is deemed safe and performant. In this work, we consider two variants of the proposed framework: one using raw grid-based embeddings, and another leveraging instance segmentation for object-centric representations. To further improve robustness, we introduce a simple filtering mechanism to suppress false positives. Our evaluations on CARLA-simulated anomalies show that the instance-based method with filtering achieves performance comparable to GPT-4o, while providing precise anomaly localization. These results highlight the potential utility of vision embeddings from foundation models for real-time anomaly detection in autonomous systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Thermal-LiDAR Fusion for Robust Tunnel Localization in GNSS-Denied and Low-Visibility Conditions

Despite significant progress in autonomous navigation, a critical gap remains in ensuring reliable localization in hazardous environments such as tunnels, urban disaster zones, and underground structures. Tunnels present a uniquely difficult scenario: they are not only prone to GNSS signal loss, but also provide little features for visual localization due to their repetitive walls and poor lighting. These conditions degrade conventional vision-based and LiDAR-based systems, which rely on distinguishable environmental features. To address this, we propose a novel sensor fusion framework that integrates a thermal camera with a LiDAR to enable robust localization in tunnels and other perceptually degraded environments. The thermal camera provides resilience in low-light or smoke conditions, while the LiDAR delivers precise depth perception and structural awareness. By combining these sensors, our framework ensures continuous and accurate localization across diverse and dynamic environments. We use an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to fuse multi-sensor inputs, and leverages visual odometry and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) techniques to process the sensor data, enabling robust motion estimation and mapping even in GNSS-denied environments. This fusion of sensor modalities not only enhances system resilience but also provides a scalable solution for cyber-physical systems in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). To validate the framework, we conduct tests in a tunnel environment, simulating sensor degradation and visibility challenges. The results demonstrate that our method sustains accurate localization where standard approaches deteriorate due to the tunnels featureless geometry. The frameworks versatility makes it a promising solution for autonomous vehicles, inspection robots, and other cyber-physical systems operating in constrained, perceptually poor environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

LiDAR-Guided Monocular 3D Object Detection for Long-Range Railway Monitoring

Railway systems, particularly in Germany, require high levels of automation to address legacy infrastructure challenges and increase train traffic safely. A key component of automation is robust long-range perception, essential for early hazard detection, such as obstacles at level crossings or pedestrians on tracks. Unlike automotive systems with braking distances of ~70 meters, trains require perception ranges exceeding 1 km. This paper presents an deep-learning-based approach for long-range 3D object detection tailored for autonomous trains. The method relies solely on monocular images, inspired by the Faraway-Frustum approach, and incorporates LiDAR data during training to improve depth estimation. The proposed pipeline consists of four key modules: (1) a modified YOLOv9 for 2.5D object detection, (2) a depth estimation network, and (3-4) dedicated short- and long-range 3D detection heads. Evaluations on the OSDaR23 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in detecting objects up to 250 meters. Results highlight its potential for railway automation and outline areas for future improvement.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Data-Centric Approach to 3D Semantic Segmentation of Railway Scenes

LiDAR-based semantic segmentation is critical for autonomous trains, requiring accurate predictions across varying distances. This paper introduces two targeted data augmentation methods designed to improve segmentation performance on the railway-specific OSDaR23 dataset. The person instance pasting method enhances segmentation of pedestrians at distant ranges by injecting realistic variations into the dataset. The track sparsification method redistributes point density in LiDAR scans, improving track segmentation at far distances with minimal impact on close-range accuracy. Both methods are evaluated using a state-of-the-art 3D semantic segmentation network, demonstrating significant improvements in distant-range performance while maintaining robustness in close-range predictions. We establish the first 3D semantic segmentation benchmark for OSDaR23, demonstrating the potential of data-centric approaches to address railway-specific challenges in autonomous train perception.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

WS-DETR: Robust Water Surface Object Detection through Vision-Radar Fusion with Detection Transformer

Robust object detection for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) in complex water environments is essential for reliable navigation and operation. Specifically, water surface object detection faces challenges from blurred edges and diverse object scales. Although vision-radar fusion offers a feasible solution, existing approaches suffer from cross-modal feature conflicts, which negatively affect model robustness. To address this problem, we propose a robust vision-radar fusion model WS-DETR. In particular, we first introduce a Multi-Scale Edge Information Integration (MSEII) module to enhance edge perception and a Hierarchical Feature Aggregator (HiFA) to boost multi-scale object detection in the encoder. Then, we adopt self-moving point representations for continuous convolution and residual connection to efficiently extract irregular features under the scenarios of irregular point cloud data. To further mitigate cross-modal conflicts, an Adaptive Feature Interactive Fusion (AFIF) module is introduced to integrate visual and radar features through geometric alignment and semantic fusion. Extensive experiments on the WaterScenes dataset demonstrate that WS-DETR achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, maintaining its superiority even under adverse weather and lighting conditions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Spatiotemporal Attention-Augmented Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Task Allocation

Adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for multi-agent task allocation (MATA) is challenged by non-stationary interactions and high-dimensional coordination. Unconstrained reward inference in these settings often leads to high variance and poor generalization. We propose an attention-structured adversarial IRL framework that constrains reward inference via spatiotemporal representation learning. Our method employs multi-head self-attention (MHSA) for long-range temporal dependencies and graph attention networks (GAT) for agent-task relational structures. We formulate reward inference as a low-capacity, adaptive linear transformation of the environment reward, ensuring stable and interpretable guidance. This framework decouples reward inference from policy learning and optimizes the reward model adversarially. Experiments on benchmark MATA scenarios show that our approach outperforms representative MARL baselines in convergence speed, cumulative rewards, and spatial efficiency. Results demonstrate that attention-guided, capacity-constrained reward inference is a scalable and effective mechanism for stabilizing adversarial IRL in complex multi-agent systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

A Cost-Effective Approach to Smooth A* Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

Path planning for wheeled mobile robots is a critical component in the field of automation and intelligent transportation systems. Car-like vehicles, which have non-holonomic constraints on their movement capability impose additional requirements on the planned paths. Traditional path planning algorithms, such as A* , are widely used due to their simplicity and effectiveness in finding optimal paths in complex environments. However, these algorithms often do not consider vehicle dynamics, resulting in paths that are infeasible or impractical for actual driving. Specifically, a path that minimizes the number of grid cells may still be too curvy or sharp for a car-like vehicle to navigate smoothly. This paper addresses the need for a path planning solution that not only finds a feasible path but also ensures that the path is smooth and drivable. By adapting the A* algorithm for a curvature constraint and incorporating a cost function that considers the smoothness of possible paths, we aim to bridge the gap between grid based path planning and smooth paths that are drivable by car-like vehicles. The proposed method leverages motion primitives, pre-computed using a ribbon based path planner that produces smooth paths of minimum curvature. The motion primitives guide the A* algorithm in finding paths of minimal length and curvature. With the proposed modification on the A* algorithm, the planned paths can be constraint to have a minimum turning radius much larger than the grid size. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in different unstructured environments. In a two-stage planning approach, first the modified A* algorithm finds a grid-based path and the ribbon based path planner creates a smooth path within the area of grid cells. The resulting paths are smooth with small curvatures independent of the orientation of the grid axes and even in presence of sharp obstacles.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Segment-Anything Models Achieve Zero-shot Robustness in Autonomous Driving

Semantic segmentation is a significant perception task in autonomous driving. It suffers from the risks of adversarial examples. In the past few years, deep learning has gradually transitioned from convolutional neural network (CNN) models with a relatively small number of parameters to foundation models with a huge number of parameters. The segment-anything model (SAM) is a generalized image segmentation framework that is capable of handling various types of images and is able to recognize and segment arbitrary objects in an image without the need to train on a specific object. It is a unified model that can handle diverse downstream tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, and tracking. In the task of semantic segmentation for autonomous driving, it is significant to study the zero-shot adversarial robustness of SAM. Therefore, we deliver a systematic empirical study on the robustness of SAM without additional training. Based on the experimental results, the zero-shot adversarial robustness of the SAM under the black-box corruptions and white-box adversarial attacks is acceptable, even without the need for additional training. The finding of this study is insightful in that the gigantic model parameters and huge amounts of training data lead to the phenomenon of emergence, which builds a guarantee of adversarial robustness. SAM is a vision foundation model that can be regarded as an early prototype of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) pipeline. In such a pipeline, a unified model can handle diverse tasks. Therefore, this research not only inspects the impact of vision foundation models on safe autonomous driving but also provides a perspective on developing trustworthy AGI. The code is available at: https://github.com/momo1986/robust_sam_iv.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Deep Learning-Driven State Correction: A Hybrid Architecture for Radar-Based Dynamic Occupancy Grid Mapping

This paper introduces a novel hybrid architecture that enhances radar-based Dynamic Occupancy Grid Mapping (DOGM) for autonomous vehicles, integrating deep learning for state-classification. Traditional radar-based DOGM often faces challenges in accurately distinguishing between static and dynamic objects. Our approach addresses this limitation by introducing a neural network-based DOGM state correction mechanism, designed as a semantic segmentation task, to refine the accuracy of the occupancy grid. Additionally a heuristic fusion approach is proposed which allows to enhance performance without compromising on safety. We extensively evaluate this hybrid architecture on the NuScenes Dataset, focusing on its ability to improve dynamic object detection as well grid quality. The results show clear improvements in the detection capabilities of dynamic objects, highlighting the effectiveness of the deep learning-enhanced state correction in radar-based DOGM.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Random Network Distillation Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for AGV Path Planning

With the flourishing development of intelligent warehousing systems, the technology of Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) has experienced rapid growth. Within intelligent warehousing environments, AGV is required to safely and rapidly plan an optimal path in complex and dynamic environments. Most research has studied deep reinforcement learning to address this challenge. However, in the environments with sparse extrinsic rewards, these algorithms often converge slowly, learn inefficiently or fail to reach the target. Random Network Distillation (RND), as an exploration enhancement, can effectively improve the performance of proximal policy optimization, especially enhancing the additional intrinsic rewards of the AGV agent which is in sparse reward environments. Moreover, most of the current research continues to use 2D grid mazes as experimental environments. These environments have insufficient complexity and limited action sets. To solve this limitation, we present simulation environments of AGV path planning with continuous actions and positions for AGVs, so that it can be close to realistic physical scenarios. Based on our experiments and comprehensive analysis of the proposed method, the results demonstrate that our proposed method enables AGV to more rapidly complete path planning tasks with continuous actions in our environments. A video of part of our experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/lwrY9YesGmw.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Dynamic Occupancy Grids for Object Detection: A Radar-Centric Approach

Dynamic Occupancy Grid Mapping is a technique used to generate a local map of the environment containing both static and dynamic information. Typically, these maps are primarily generated using lidar measurements. However, with improvements in radar sensing, resulting in better accuracy and higher resolution, radar is emerging as a viable alternative to lidar as the primary sensor for mapping. In this paper, we propose a radar-centric dynamic occupancy grid mapping algorithm with adaptations to the state computation, inverse sensor model, and field-of-view computation tailored to the specifics of radar measurements. We extensively evaluate our approach using real data to demonstrate its effectiveness and establish the first benchmark for radar-based dynamic occupancy grid mapping using the publicly available Radarscenes dataset.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

Multi-objective path tracking control for car-like vehicles with differentially bounded n-smooth output

When designing path tracking controllers for car-like vehicles, two main aspects are the tracking performance and the characteristics of the actuation signal. Our work bases on an existing variable structure controller that was designed with the geometrically optimal solution of a Dubins car, but with chattering on the output. In this contribution, we extend this approach to achieve an actuation signal that is n-smooth and differentially bounded. While the global stability under matched disturbances is maintained, the finite time reaching behavior is exchanged for asymptotic convergence. With the $n$-smooth output, n new parameters are introduced, weighing the control characteristics between the tracking performance and the magnitude of the steering angles derivatives. The controller is also evaluated in simulation, demonstrating the tuning capabilities, as well as the reaching and tracking behavior. The main contribution of this work is a control law designed to produce a smooth steering angle with implicit satisfaction of bounds on its derivatives.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2023

Performance of Graph Database Management Systems as route planning solutions for different data and usage characteristics

Graph databases have grown in popularity in recent years as they are able to efficiently store and query complex relationships between data. Incidentally, navigation data and road networks can be processed, sampled or modified efficiently when stored as a graph. As a result, graph databases are a solution for solving route planning tasks that comes more and more to the attention of developers of autonomous vehicles. To achieve a computational performance that enables the realization of route planning on large road networks or for a great number of agents concurrently, several aspects need to be considered in the design of the solution. Based on a concrete use case for centralized route planning, we discuss the characteristics and properties of a use case that can significantly influence the computational effort or efficiency of the database management system. Subsequently we evaluate the performance of both Neo4j and ArangoDB depending on these properties. With these results, it is not only possible to choose the most suitable database system but also to improve the resulting performance by addressing relevant aspects in the design of the application.

cs.DB↗