arXiv subjects

Runwei Guan

Publications and source records attributed to Runwei Guan.

46 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

DRIVE: Dependable Robust Interpretable Visionary Ensemble Framework in Autonomous Driving

Recent advancements in autonomous driving have seen a paradigm shift towards end-to-end learning paradigms, which map sensory inputs directly to driving actions, thereby enhancing the robustness and adaptability of autonomous vehicles. However, these models often sacrifice interpretability, posing significant challenges to trust, safety, and regulatory compliance. To address these issues, we introduce DRIVE -- Dependable Robust Interpretable Visionary Ensemble Framework in Autonomous Driving, a comprehensive framework designed to improve the dependability and stability of explanations in end-to-end unsupervised autonomous driving models. Our work specifically targets the inherent instability problems observed in the Driving through the Concept Gridlock (DCG) model, which undermine the trustworthiness of its explanations and decision-making processes. We define four key attributes of DRIVE: consistent interpretability, stable interpretability, consistent output, and stable output. These attributes collectively ensure that explanations remain reliable and robust across different scenarios and perturbations. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in enhancing the stability and dependability of explanations, thereby addressing the limitations of current models. Our contributions include an in-depth analysis of the dependability issues within the DCG model, a rigorous definition of DRIVE with its fundamental properties, a framework to implement DRIVE, and novel metrics for evaluating the dependability of concept-based explainable autonomous driving models. These advancements lay the groundwork for the development of more reliable and trusted autonomous driving systems, paving the way for their broader acceptance and deployment in real-world applications.

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arXiv2024

ASY-VRNet: Waterway Panoptic Driving Perception Model based on Asymmetric Fair Fusion of Vision and 4D mmWave Radar

Panoptic Driving Perception (PDP) is critical for the autonomous navigation of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). A PDP model typically integrates multiple tasks, necessitating the simultaneous and robust execution of various perception tasks to facilitate downstream path planning. The fusion of visual and radar sensors is currently acknowledged as a robust and cost-effective approach. However, most existing research has primarily focused on fusing visual and radar features dedicated to object detection or utilizing a shared feature space for multiple tasks, neglecting the individual representation differences between various tasks. To address this gap, we propose a pair of Asymmetric Fair Fusion (AFF) modules with favorable explainability designed to efficiently interact with independent features from both visual and radar modalities, tailored to the specific requirements of object detection and semantic segmentation tasks. The AFF modules treat image and radar maps as irregular point sets and transform these features into a crossed-shared feature space for multitasking, ensuring equitable treatment of vision and radar point cloud features. Leveraging AFF modules, we propose a novel and efficient PDP model, ASY-VRNet, which processes image and radar features based on irregular super-pixel point sets. Additionally, we propose an effective multitask learning method specifically designed for PDP models. Compared to other lightweight models, ASY-VRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in object detection, semantic segmentation, and drivable-area segmentation on the WaterScenes benchmark. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/ASY-VRNet.

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arXiv2024

WaterScenes: A Multi-Task 4D Radar-Camera Fusion Dataset and Benchmarks for Autonomous Driving on Water Surfaces

Autonomous driving on water surfaces plays an essential role in executing hazardous and time-consuming missions, such as maritime surveillance, survivors rescue, environmental monitoring, hydrography mapping and waste cleaning. This work presents WaterScenes, the first multi-task 4D radar-camera fusion dataset for autonomous driving on water surfaces. Equipped with a 4D radar and a monocular camera, our Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) proffers all-weather solutions for discerning object-related information, including color, shape, texture, range, velocity, azimuth, and elevation. Focusing on typical static and dynamic objects on water surfaces, we label the camera images and radar point clouds at pixel-level and point-level, respectively. In addition to basic perception tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, we also provide annotations for free-space segmentation and waterline segmentation. Leveraging the multi-task and multi-modal data, we conduct benchmark experiments on the uni-modality of radar and camera, as well as the fused modalities. Experimental results demonstrate that 4D radar-camera fusion can considerably improve the accuracy and robustness of perception on water surfaces, especially in adverse lighting and weather conditions. WaterScenes dataset is public on https://waterscenes.github.io.

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arXiv2024

Referring Flexible Image Restoration

In reality, images often exhibit multiple degradations, such as rain and fog at night (triple degradations). However, in many cases, individuals may not want to remove all degradations, for instance, a blurry lens revealing a beautiful snowy landscape (double degradations). In such scenarios, people may only desire to deblur. These situations and requirements shed light on a new challenge in image restoration, where a model must perceive and remove specific degradation types specified by human commands in images with multiple degradations. We term this task Referring Flexible Image Restoration (RFIR). To address this, we first construct a large-scale synthetic dataset called RFIR, comprising 153,423 samples with the degraded image, text prompt for specific degradation removal and restored image. RFIR consists of five basic degradation types: blur, rain, haze, low light and snow while six main sub-categories are included for varying degrees of degradation removal. To tackle the challenge, we propose a novel transformer-based multi-task model named TransRFIR, which simultaneously perceives degradation types in the degraded image and removes specific degradation upon text prompt. TransRFIR is based on two devised attention modules, Multi-Head Agent Self-Attention (MHASA) and Multi-Head Agent Cross Attention (MHACA), where MHASA and MHACA introduce the agent token and reach the linear complexity, achieving lower computation cost than vanilla self-attention and cross-attention and obtaining competitive performances. Our TransRFIR achieves state-of-the-art performances compared with other counterparts and is proven as an effective architecture for image restoration. We release our project at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/FIR-CP.

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arXiv2024

WaterVG: Waterway Visual Grounding based on Text-Guided Vision and mmWave Radar

The perception of waterways based on human intent is significant for autonomous navigation and operations of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) in water environments. Inspired by visual grounding, we introduce WaterVG, the first visual grounding dataset designed for USV-based waterway perception based on human prompts. WaterVG encompasses prompts describing multiple targets, with annotations at the instance level including bounding boxes and masks. Notably, WaterVG includes 11,568 samples with 34,987 referred targets, whose prompts integrates both visual and radar characteristics. The pattern of text-guided two sensors equips a finer granularity of text prompts with visual and radar features of referred targets. Moreover, we propose a low-power visual grounding model, Potamoi, which is a multi-task model with a well-designed Phased Heterogeneous Modality Fusion (PHMF) mode, including Adaptive Radar Weighting (ARW) and Multi-Head Slim Cross Attention (MHSCA). Exactly, ARW extracts required radar features to fuse with vision for prompt alignment. MHSCA is an efficient fusion module with a remarkably small parameter count and FLOPs, elegantly fusing scenario context captured by two sensors with linguistic features, which performs expressively on visual grounding tasks. Comprehensive experiments and evaluations have been conducted on WaterVG, where our Potamoi archives state-of-the-art performances compared with counterparts.

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arXiv2023

Achelous++: Power-Oriented Water-Surface Panoptic Perception Framework on Edge Devices based on Vision-Radar Fusion and Pruning of Heterogeneous Modalities

Urban water-surface robust perception serves as the foundation for intelligent monitoring of aquatic environments and the autonomous navigation and operation of unmanned vessels, especially in the context of waterway safety. It is worth noting that current multi-sensor fusion and multi-task learning models consume substantial power and heavily rely on high-power GPUs for inference. This contributes to increased carbon emissions, a concern that runs counter to the prevailing emphasis on environmental preservation and the pursuit of sustainable, low-carbon urban environments. In light of these concerns, this paper concentrates on low-power, lightweight, multi-task panoptic perception through the fusion of visual and 4D radar data, which is seen as a promising low-cost perception method. We propose a framework named Achelous++ that facilitates the development and comprehensive evaluation of multi-task water-surface panoptic perception models. Achelous++ can simultaneously execute five perception tasks with high speed and low power consumption, including object detection, object semantic segmentation, drivable-area segmentation, waterline segmentation, and radar point cloud semantic segmentation. Furthermore, to meet the demand for developers to customize models for real-time inference on low-performance devices, a novel multi-modal pruning strategy known as Heterogeneous-Aware SynFlow (HA-SynFlow) is proposed. Besides, Achelous++ also supports random pruning at initialization with different layer-wise sparsity, such as Uniform and Erdos-Renyi-Kernel (ERK). Overall, our Achelous++ framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WaterScenes benchmark, excelling in both accuracy and power efficiency compared to other single-task and multi-task models. We release and maintain the code at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Achelous.

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arXiv2023

Radar-Camera Fusion for Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review

Driven by deep learning techniques, perception technology in autonomous driving has developed rapidly in recent years, enabling vehicles to accurately detect and interpret surrounding environment for safe and efficient navigation. To achieve accurate and robust perception capabilities, autonomous vehicles are often equipped with multiple sensors, making sensor fusion a crucial part of the perception system. Among these fused sensors, radars and cameras enable a complementary and cost-effective perception of the surrounding environment regardless of lighting and weather conditions. This review aims to provide a comprehensive guideline for radar-camera fusion, particularly concentrating on perception tasks related to object detection and semantic segmentation.Based on the principles of the radar and camera sensors, we delve into the data processing process and representations, followed by an in-depth analysis and summary of radar-camera fusion datasets. In the review of methodologies in radar-camera fusion, we address interrogative questions, including "why to fuse", "what to fuse", "where to fuse", "when to fuse", and "how to fuse", subsequently discussing various challenges and potential research directions within this domain. To ease the retrieval and comparison of datasets and fusion methods, we also provide an interactive website: https://radar-camera-fusion.github.io.

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arXiv2023

Radar-STDA: A High-Performance Spatial-Temporal Denoising Autoencoder for Interference Mitigation of FMCW Radars

With its small size, low cost and all-weather operation, millimeter-wave radar can accurately measure the distance, azimuth and radial velocity of a target compared to other traffic sensors. However, in practice, millimeter-wave radars are plagued by various interferences, leading to a drop in target detection accuracy or even failure to detect targets. This is undesirable in autonomous vehicles and traffic surveillance, as it is likely to threaten human life and cause property damage. Therefore, interference mitigation is of great significance for millimeter-wave radar-based target detection. Currently, the development of deep learning is rapid, but existing deep learning-based interference mitigation models still have great limitations in terms of model size and inference speed. For these reasons, we propose Radar-STDA, a Radar-Spatial Temporal Denoising Autoencoder. Radar-STDA is an efficient nano-level denoising autoencoder that takes into account both spatial and temporal information of range-Doppler maps. Among other methods, it achieves a maximum SINR of 17.08 dB with only 140,000 parameters. It obtains 207.6 FPS on an RTX A4000 GPU and 56.8 FPS on an NVIDIA Jetson AGXXavier respectively when denoising range-Doppler maps for three consecutive frames. Moreover, we release a synthetic data set called Ra-inf for the task, which involves 384,769 range-Doppler maps with various clutters from objects of no interest and receiver noise in realistic scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, Ra-inf is the first synthetic dataset of radar interference. To support the community, our research is open-source via the link \url{https://github.com/GuanRunwei/rd_map_temporal_spatial_denoising_autoencoder}.

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arXiv2023

Achelous: A Fast Unified Water-surface Panoptic Perception Framework based on Fusion of Monocular Camera and 4D mmWave Radar

Current perception models for different tasks usually exist in modular forms on Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), which infer extremely slowly in parallel on edge devices, causing the asynchrony between perception results and USV position, and leading to error decisions of autonomous navigation. Compared with Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), the robust perception of USVs develops relatively slowly. Moreover, most current multi-task perception models are huge in parameters, slow in inference and not scalable. Oriented on this, we propose Achelous, a low-cost and fast unified panoptic perception framework for water-surface perception based on the fusion of a monocular camera and 4D mmWave radar. Achelous can simultaneously perform five tasks, detection and segmentation of visual targets, drivable-area segmentation, waterline segmentation and radar point cloud segmentation. Besides, models in Achelous family, with less than around 5 million parameters, achieve about 18 FPS on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, 11 FPS faster than HybridNets, and exceed YOLOX-Tiny and Segformer-B0 on our collected dataset about 5 mAP$_{\text{50-95}}$ and 0.7 mIoU, especially under situations of adverse weather, dark environments and camera failure. To our knowledge, Achelous is the first comprehensive panoptic perception framework combining vision-level and point-cloud-level tasks for water-surface perception. To promote the development of the intelligent transportation community, we release our codes in \url{https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Achelous}.

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arXiv2023

FindVehicle and VehicleFinder: A NER dataset for natural language-based vehicle retrieval and a keyword-based cross-modal vehicle retrieval system

Natural language (NL) based vehicle retrieval is a task aiming to retrieve a vehicle that is most consistent with a given NL query from among all candidate vehicles. Because NL query can be easily obtained, such a task has a promising prospect in building an interactive intelligent traffic system (ITS). Current solutions mainly focus on extracting both text and image features and mapping them to the same latent space to compare the similarity. However, existing methods usually use dependency analysis or semantic role-labelling techniques to find keywords related to vehicle attributes. These techniques may require a lot of pre-processing and post-processing work, and also suffer from extracting the wrong keyword when the NL query is complex. To tackle these problems and simplify, we borrow the idea from named entity recognition (NER) and construct FindVehicle, a NER dataset in the traffic domain. It has 42.3k labelled NL descriptions of vehicle tracks, containing information such as the location, orientation, type and colour of the vehicle. FindVehicle also adopts both overlapping entities and fine-grained entities to meet further requirements. To verify its effectiveness, we propose a baseline NL-based vehicle retrieval model called VehicleFinder. Our experiment shows that by using text encoders pre-trained by FindVehicle, VehicleFinder achieves 87.7\% precision and 89.4\% recall when retrieving a target vehicle by text command on our homemade dataset based on UA-DETRAC. The time cost of VehicleFinder is 279.35 ms on one ARM v8.2 CPU and 93.72 ms on one RTX A4000 GPU, which is much faster than the Transformer-based system. The dataset is open-source via the link https://github.com/GuanRunwei/FindVehicle, and the implementation can be found via the link https://github.com/GuanRunwei/VehicleFinder-CTIM.

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