Simulation is crucial for developing and evaluating autonomous vehicle (AV) systems. Recent literature builds on a new generation of generative models to synthesize highly realistic images for full-stack simulation. However, purely synthetically generated scenes are not grounded in reality and have difficulty in inspiring confidence in the relevance of its outcomes. Editing models, on the other hand, leverage source scenes from real driving logs, and enable the simulation of different traffic layouts, behaviors, and operating conditions such as weather and time of day. While image editing is an established topic in computer vision, it presents fresh sets of challenges in driving simulation: (1) the need for cross-camera 3D consistency, (2) learning “empty street” priors from driving data with foreground occlusions, and (3) obtaining paired image tuples of varied editing conditions while preserving consistent layout and geometry. To address these challenges, we propose SceneCrafter, a versatile editor for realistic 3D-consistent manipulation of driving scenes captured from multiple cameras. We build on recent advancements in multi-view diffusion models, using a fully controllable framework that scales seamlessly to multi-modality conditions like weather, time of day, agent boxes and high-definition maps. To generate paired data for supervising the editing model, we propose a novel framework on top of Prompt-to-Prompt [15] to generate geometrically consistent synthetic paired data with global edits. We also introduce an alpha-blending framework to synthesize data with local edits, leveraging a model trained on empty street priors through novel masked training and multi-view repaint paradigm. SceneCrafter demonstrates powerful editing capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art realism, controllability, 3D consistency, and scene editing quality compared to existing baselines.

Recent advances in generative models have sparked exciting new possibilities in the field of autonomous vehicles. Specifically, video generation models are now being explored as controllable virtual testing environments. Simultaneously, end-to-end (E2E) driving models have emerged as a streamlined alternative to conventional modular autonomous driving systems, gaining popularity for their simplicity and scalability. However, the application of these techniques to simulation and planning raises important questions. First, while video generation models can generate increasingly realistic videos, can these videos faithfully adhere to the specified conditions and be realistic enough for E2E autonomous planner evaluation? Second, given that data is crucial for understanding and controlling E2E planners, how can we gain deeper insights into their biases and improve their ability to generalize to out-of-distribution scenarios? In this work, we bridge the gap between the driving models and generative world models (Drive&Gen) to address these questions. We propose novel statistical measures leveraging E2E drivers to evaluate the realism of generated videos. By exploiting the controllability of the video generation model, we conduct targeted experiments to investigate distribution gaps affecting E2E planner performance. Finally, we show that synthetic data produced by the video generation model offers a cost-effective alternative to real-world data collection. This synthetic data effectively improves E2E model generalization beyond existing Operational Design Domains, facilitating the expansion of autonomous vehicle services into new operational contexts.

Many existing motion prediction approaches rely on symbolic perception outputs to generate agent trajectories, such as bounding boxes, road graph information and traffic lights. This symbolic representation is a high-level abstraction of the real world, which may render the motion prediction model vulnerable to perception errors (e.g., failures in detecting open-vocabulary obstacles) while missing salient information from the scene context (e.g., poor road conditions). An alternative paradigm is end-to-end learning from raw sensors. However, this approach suffers from the lack of interpretability and requires significantly more training resources. In this work, we propose tokenizing the visual world into a compact set of scene elements and then leveraging pre-trained image foundation models and LiDAR neural networks to encode all the scene elements in an open-vocabulary manner. The image foundation model enables our scene tokens to encode the general knowledge of the open world while the LiDAR neural network encodes geometry information. Our proposed representation can efficiently encode the multi-frame multi-modality observations with a few hundred tokens and is compatible with most transformer-based architectures. To evaluate our method, we have augmented Waymo Open Motion Dataset with camera embeddings. Experiments over Waymo Open Motion Dataset show that our approach leads to significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art.

This paper advocates the use of implicit surface representation in autoencoder-based self-supervised 3D representation learning. The most popular and accessible 3D representation, i.e., point clouds, involves discrete samples of the underlying continuous 3D surface. This discretization process introduces sampling variations on the 3D shape, making it challenging to develop transferable knowledge of the true 3D geometry. In the standard autoencoding paradigm, the encoder is compelled to encode not only the 3D geometry but also information on the specific discrete sampling of the 3D shape into the latent code. This is because the point cloud reconstructed by the decoder is considered unacceptable unless there is a perfect mapping between the original and the reconstructed point clouds. This paper introduces the Implicit AutoEncoder (IAE), a simple yet effective method that addresses the sampling variation issue by replacing the commonly-used point-cloud decoder with an implicit decoder. The implicit decoder reconstructs a continuous representation of the 3D shape, independent of the imperfections in the discrete samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed IAE achieves state-of-the-art performance across various self-supervised learning benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/SimingYan/IAE.

Reconstructing an accurate 3D object model from a few image observations remains a challenging problem in computer vision. State-of-the-art approaches typically assume accurate camera poses as input, which could be difficult to obtain in realistic settings. In this paper, we present FvOR, a learning-based object reconstruction method that predicts accurate 3D models given a few images with noisy input poses. The core of our approach is a fast and robust multi-view reconstruction algorithm to jointly refine 3D geometry and camera pose estimation using learnable neural network modules. We provide a thorough benchmark of state-of-the-art approaches for this problem on ShapeNet. Our approach achieves best-in-class results. It is also two orders of magnitude faster than the recent optimization-based approach IDR [67].

Deep learning has made significant impacts on multiview stereo systems. State-of-the-art approaches typically involve building a cost volume, followed by multiple 3D convolution operations to recover the input image's pixel-wise depth. While such end-to-end learning of plane-sweeping stereo advances public benchmarks' accuracy, they are typically very slow to compute. We present MVS2D, a highly efficient multi-view stereo algorithm that seamlessly integrates multi-view constraints into single-view net-works via an attention mechanism. Since MVS2D only builds on 2D convolutions, it is at least$2\times faster$than all the notable counterparts. Moreover, our algorithm produces precise depth estimations and 3D reconstructions, achieving state-of-the-art results on challenging benchmarks ScanNet, SUN3D, RGBD, and the classical DTU dataset. our algorithm also outperforms all other algorithms in the setting of inexact camera poses. Our code is released at https://github.com/zhenpeiyang/MVS2D

Monocular 3D prediction is one of the fundamental problems in 3D vision. Recent deep learning-based approaches have brought us exciting progress on this problem. However, existing approaches have predominantly focused on end-to-end depth and normal predictions, which do not fully utilize the underlying 3D environment’s geometric structures. This paper introduces StruMonoNet, which detects and enforces a planar structure to enhance pixel-wise predictions. StruMonoNet innovates in leveraging a hybrid representation that combines visual feature and a surfel representation for plane prediction. This formulation allows us to combine the power of visual feature learning and the flexibility of geometric representations in incorporating geometric relations. As a result, StruMonoNet can detect relations between planes such as adjacent planes, perpendicular planes, and parallel planes, all of which are beneficial for dense 3D prediction. Experimental results show that StruMonoNet considerably outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on NYUv2 and ScanNet.

This paper introduces HPNet, a novel deep-learning approach for segmenting a 3D shape represented as a point cloud into primitive patches. The key to deep primitive segmentation is learning a feature representation that can separate points of different primitives. Unlike utilizing a single feature representation, HPNet leverages hybrid representations that combine one learned semantic descriptor, two spectral descriptors derived from predicted geometric parameters, as well as an adjacency matrix that encodes sharp edges. Moreover, instead of merely concatenating the descriptors, HPNet optimally combines hybrid representations by learning combination weights. This weighting module builds on the entropy of input features. The output primitive segmentation is obtained from a meanshift clustering module. Experimental results on benchmark datasets ANSI and ABCParts show that HPNet leads to significant performance gains from baseline approaches.

Autonomous driving system development is critically dependent on the ability to replay complex and diverse traffic scenarios in simulation. In such scenarios, the ability to accurately simulate the vehicle sensors such as cameras, lidar or radar is hugely helpful. However, current sensor simulators leverage gaming engines such as Unreal or Unity, requiring manual creation of environments, objects, and material properties. Such approaches have limited scalability and fail to produce realistic approximations of camera, lidar, and radar data without significant additional work. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach to generate realistic scenario sensor data, based only on a limited amount of lidar and camera data collected by an autonomous vehicle. Our approach uses texture-mapped surfels to efficiently reconstruct the scene from an initial vehicle pass or set of passes, preserving rich information about object 3D geometry and appearance, as well as the scene conditions. We then leverage a SurfelGAN network to reconstruct realistic camera images for novel positions and orientations of the self-driving vehicle and moving objects in the scene. We demonstrate our approach on the Waymo Open Dataset and show that it can synthesize realistic camera data for simulated scenarios. We also create a novel dataset that contains cases in which two self-driving vehicles observe the same scene at the same time. We use this dataset to provide additional evaluation and demonstrate the usefulness of our SurfelGAN model.

In this paper, we introduce a novel RGB-D based relative pose estimation approach that is suitable for smalloverlapping or non-overlapping scans and can output multiple relative poses. Our method performs scene completion and matches the completed scans. However, instead of using afixed representation for completion, the key idea is to utilize hybrid representations that combine 360-image, 2D image-based layout, and planar patches. This approach offers adaptively feature representations for relative pose estimation. Besides, we introduce a global-2-local matching procedure, which utilizes initial relative poses obtained during the global phase to detect and then integrate geometric relations for pose refinement. Experimental results justify the potential of this approach across a wide range of benchmark datasets. For example, on ScanNet, the rotation translation errors of the top-1/top-5 predictions of our approach are 28.6°/0.90m and 16.8°/0.76m, respectively. Our approach also considerably boosts the performance of multiscan reconstruction in few-view reconstruction settings.

We present a deep generative scene modeling technique for indoor environments. Our goal is to train a generative model using a feed-forward neural network that maps a prior distribution (e.g., a normal distribution) to the distribution of primary objects in indoor scenes. We introduce a 3D object arrangement representation that models the locations and orientations of objects, based on their size and shape attributes. Moreover, our scene representation is applicable for 3D objects with different multiplicities (repetition counts), selected from a database. We show a principled way to train this model by combining discriminative losses for both a 3D object arrangement representation and a 2D image-based representation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our scene representation and the network training method on benchmark datasets. We also show the applications of this generative model in scene interpolation and scene completion.

Estimating the relative rigid pose between two RGB-D scans of the same underlying environment is a fundamental problem in computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. Most existing approaches allow only limited maximum relative pose changes since they require considerable overlap between the input scans. We introduce a novel approach that extends the scope to extreme relative poses, with little or even no overlap between the input scans. The key idea is to infer more complete scene information about the underlying environment and match on the completed scans. In particular, instead of only performing scene completion from each individual scan, our approach alternates between relative pose estimation and scene completion. This allows us to perform scene completion by utilizing information from both input scans at late iterations, resulting in better results for both scene completion and relative pose estimation. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our approach leads to considerable improvements over state-of-the-art approaches for relative pose estimation. In particular, our approach provides encouraging relative pose estimates even between non-overlapping scans.

Automatic generation of 3D visual content is a fundamental problem that sits at the intersection of visual computing and artificial intelligence. So far, most existing works have focused on geometry synthesis. In contrast, advances in automatic synthesis of color information, which conveys rich semantic information of 3D geometry, remain rather limited. In this paper, we propose to learn a generative model that maps a latent color parameter space to a space of colorizations across a shape collection. The colorizations are diverse on each shape and consistent across the shape collection. We introduce an unsupervised approach for training this generative model and demonstrate its effectiveness across a wide range of categories. The key feature of our approach is that it only requires one colorization per shape in the training data, and utilizes a neural network to propagate the color information of other shapes to train the generative model for each particular shape. This characteristics makes our approach applicable to standard internet shape repositories.