Corner cases, such as severe weather and abnormal lighting, present significant challenges in autonomous driving. The main obstacles involve large-scale data collection and costly annotations. Leveraging generative models to expand corner-case data based on existing annotations offers a promising solution. Unlike monocular videos, multi-view videos introduce an additional "view" dimension, increasing the consistency requirements and making precise control of annotations more challenging. Existing methods decouple multi-view videos along the temporal and view-spatial axes, using separate attention mechanisms, which causes motion discrepancies and limits consistency. Additionally, current approaches employ an independent adapter or ControlNet to encode different 3D annotations, leading to high computational costs and suboptimal alignment between annotations and video latents. These issues arise from neglecting the temporal-spatial relationship and insufficient alignment between 3D annotations and video latents. To address these challenges, we propose DriveGen, which uses 4D position embeddings to encode the positional information of multi-view videos. DriveGen also designs Dual-Scale Full Attention to ensure both global and local spatiotemporal consistency. Furthermore, our Shared Video-Condition Encoding (SVCE) Mechanism converts 3D annotations into 2D masks and encodes both video and annotation sequences using a 3D VAE, requiring only 0.37 M learnable parameters to achieve pixel-level alignment and improving generation quality. Numerous experiments have proven that DriveGen has reached the state-of-the-art, capable of generating high-quality controlled autonomous driving videos.

The Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with extensive world knowledge have revitalized autonomous driving, particularly in reasoning tasks within perceivable regions. However, when faced with perception-limited areas (dynamic or static occlusion regions), MLLMs struggle to effectively integrate perception ability with world knowledge for reasoning. These perception-limited regions can conceal crucial safety information, especially for vulnerable road users. In this paper, we propose a framework, which aims to improve autonomous driving performance under perception-limited conditions by enhancing the integration of perception capabilities and world knowledge. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play instruction-guided interaction module that bridges modality gaps and significantly reduces the input sequence length, allowing it to adapt effectively to multi-view video inputs. Furthermore, to better integrate world knowledge with driving-related tasks, we have collected and refined a large-scale multi-modal dataset that includes 2 million natural language QA pairs, 1.7 million grounding task data. To evaluate the model’s utilization of world knowledge, we introduce an object-level risk assessment dataset comprising 200K QA pairs, where the questions necessitate multi-step reasoning leveraging world knowledge for resolution. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Answering semantically complicated questions according to an image is challenging in a visual question answering (VQA) task. Although the image can be well represented by deep learning, the question is always simply embedded and cannot well indicate its meaning. Besides, the visual and textual features have a gap for different modalities, it is difficult to align and utilize the cross-modality information. In this article, we focus on these two problems and propose a graph matching attention (GMA) network. First, it not only builds graph for the image but also constructs graph for the question in terms of both syntactic and embedding information. Next, we explore the intramodality relationships by a dual-stage graph encoder and then present a bilateral cross-modality GMA to infer the relationships between the image and the question. The updated cross-modality features are then sent into the answer prediction module for final answer prediction. Experiments demonstrate that our network achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the GQA dataset and the VQA 2.0 dataset. The ablation studies verify the effectiveness of each module in our GMA network.

Transformers achieve promising performance in document understanding because of their high effectiveness and still suffer from quadratic computational complexity dependency on the sequence length. General efficient transformers are challenging to be directly adapted to model document. They are unable to handle the layout representation in documents, e.g. word, line and paragraph, on different granularity levels and seem hard to achieve a good trade-off between efficiency and performance. To tackle the concerns, we propose Fast-StrucTexT, an efficient multi-modal framework based on the StrucTexT algorithm with an hourglass transformer architecture, for visual document understanding. Specifically, we design a modality-guided dynamic token merging block to make the model learn multi-granularity representation and prunes redundant tokens. Additionally, we present a multi-modal interaction module called Symmetry Cross-Attention (SCA) to consider multi-modal fusion and efficiently guide the token mergence. The SCA allows one modality input as query to calculate cross attention with another modality in a dual phase. Extensive experiments on FUNSD, SROIE, and CORD datasets demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance and almost 1.9x faster inference time than the state-of-the-art methods.

Structured text understanding on Visually Rich Documents (VRDs) is a crucial part of Document Intelligence. Due to the complexity of content and layout in VRDs, structured text understanding has been a challenging task. Most existing studies decoupled this problem into two sub-tasks: entity labeling and entity linking, which require an entire understanding of the context of documents at both token and segment levels. However, little work has been concerned with the solutions that efficiently extract the structured data from different levels. This paper proposes a unified framework named StrucTexT, which is flexible and effective for handling both sub-tasks. Specifically, based on the transformer, we introduce a segment-token aligned encoder to deal with the entity labeling and entity linking tasks at different levels of granularity. Moreover, we design a novel pre-training strategy with three self-supervised tasks to learn a richer representation. StrucTexT uses the existing Masked Visual Language Modeling task and the new Sentence Length Prediction and Paired Boxes Direction tasks to incorporate the multi-modal information across text, image, and layout. We evaluate our method for structured text understanding at segment-level and token-level and show it outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts with significantly superior performance on the FUNSD, SROIE, and EPHOIE datasets.

Extracting Text of Interest (ToI) from images is a crucial part of many OCR applications, such as entity recognition of cards, invoices, and receipts. Most of the existing works employ complicated engineering pipeline, which contains OCR and structure information extraction, to fulfill this task. This paper proposes an Entity-aware Attention Text Extraction Network called EATEN, which is an end-to-end trainable system to extract the ToIs without any post-processing. In the proposed framework, each entity is parsed by its corresponding entity-aware decoder, respectively. Moreover, we innovatively introduce a state transition mechanism which further improves the robustness of visual ToI extraction. In consideration of the absence of public benchmarks, we construct a dataset of almost 0.6 million images in three real-world scenarios (train ticket, passport and business card), which is publicly available at https://github.com/beacandler/EATEN. To the best of our knowledge, EATEN is the first single shot method to extract entities from images. Extensive experiments on these benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of EATEN.

In this paper, we present a novel patch-based match and fusion algorithm by taking account of moving scene in a multiple exposure image sequence using optimization. A uniform iterative approach is developed to match and find the corresponding patches in different exposure images, which are then fused in each iteration. Our approach does not need to align the input multiple exposure images before the fusion process. Considering that the pixel values are affected by various exposure time, we design a new patch-based energy function that will be optimized to improve the matching accuracy. An efficient patch-based exposure fusion approach using the random walker algorithm is developed to preserve the moving objects from the input multiple exposure images. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first patch-based exposure fusion work to preserve the moving objects of dynamic scenes that does not need the registration process of different exposure images. Experimental results of moving scenes demonstrate that our algorithm achieves visually pleasing fusion results without ghosting artifacts, while the results produced by the state-of-the-art exposure fusion and tone mapping algorithms exhibit different levels of ghosting artifacts.

This paper presents a new method to compute the dense correspondences between two images by using the energy optimization and the structured patches. In terms of the property of the sparse feature and the principle that nearest sub-scenes and neighbors are much more similar, we design a new energy optimization to guide the dense matching process and find the reliable correspondences. The sparse features are also employed to design a new structure to describe the patches. Both transformation and deformation with the structured patches are considered and incorporated into an energy optimization framework. Thus, our algorithm can match the objects robustly in complicated scenes. Finally, a local refinement technique is proposed to solve the perturbation of the matched patches. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art matching algorithms.

This paper presents a new method to compute the dense correspondences between two images by using the sparse feature-based patches in an energy optimization framework. Many transformation and deformation cues such as color, scale and rotation should be considered when we finding dense correspondences between images. However, most existing methods only consider part of these transformations, which will introduce the uncorrect correspondence results. In terms of the property of the sparse feature and the principle that nearest sub-scenes and neighbors are much more similar, we design a new energy optimization to guide the dense matching process. Both transformation and deformation are considered in our energy optimization framework since we design the feature-based patches. Thus, our algorithm can match the complicated scenes and objects robustly. At last, a local refinement technique is proposed to solve the perturbation of the matched patches. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms.

This paper describes an embedded calibration stereovision system that is able to be strongly online and auto-calibrated without placing a calibration device in front of the stereo camera, but with the device hidden inside the cavity of the system via a half-mirror. The stereo camera simultaneously observes a scene passing through the half-mirror and the calibration device reflected from the half-mirror, and makes the formation of an embedded calibration stereo pair containing both scene and the calibration device. The features of the calibration patterns are extracted from the embedded calibration stereo pair to estimate the stereo camera's parameters. We use a polyhedral-mirror to generate multiple virtual images of the calibration device to occupy large part of a scene image for accurate estimation. We also use several mirrors to extend the optical path from the calibration device to the stereo camera for depth recovery of distance objects. The system can be easily used in a wide range of applications without considering variation of camera parameters.