Collaborative perception improves task performance by expanding the perception range through information sharing among agents. Immutable heterogeneity poses a significant challenge in collaborative perception, as participating agents may employ different and fixed perception models. This leads to domain gaps in the intermediate features shared among agents, consequently degrading collaborative performance. Aligning the features of all agents to a common representation can eliminate domain gaps with low training cost. However, in existing methods, the common representation is designated as the representation of a specific agent, making it difficult for agents with significant domain discrepancies from this specific agent to achieve proper alignment. This paper proposes NegoCollab, a heterogeneous collaboration method based on the negotiated common representation. It introduces a negotiator during training to derive the common representation from the local representations of each modality's agent, effectively reducing the inherent domain gap with the various local representations. In NegoCollab, the mutual transformation of features between the local representation space and the common representation space is achieved by a pair of sender and receiver. To better align local representations to the common representation containing multimodal information, we introduce structural alignment loss and pragmatic alignment loss in addition to the distribution alignment loss to supervise the training. This enables the knowledge in the common representation to be fully distilled into the sender. The experimental results demonstrate that NegoCollab significantly outperforms existing methods in common representation-based collaboration approaches. The mechanism of obtaining common representations through negotiation provides a more reliable and flexible option for common representations in heterogeneous collaborative perception.

Multi-agent collaborative perception depends on sharing sensory information to improve perception accuracy and robustness, as well as to extend coverage. However, most collaborative perception methods ignore the limitations of communication networks, such as limited bandwidth and the possibility of wireless conflicts. To fill this gap, this paper proposes BlindSpotEliminator, a conflict-free scheduler over the cellular-V2X networks for supporting practical collaborative point cloud perception to eliminate blind spots. BlindSpotEliminator first identifies the blind spots for each vehicle, then lists the corresponding conflict relationships based on the distribution of the blind spots and communication conflicts, and finally designs an optimized point cloud data transmission strategy to eliminate the blind spots of each vehicle. Extensive experiments show that compared with greedy algorithm and random methods, BlindSpotEliminator achieves better efficiency, i.e., transmitting 20% more point cloud data.

In this paper, we propose a masked and sparse transformer to address the problem of point cloud registration with low overlap. The mask mechanism reduces the overall data, increasing the corresponding point ratio in the overlap region, while also reducing the computational cost to accelerate the algorithm's execution speed. Moreover, we combine spatial position encoding and sparse self-attention to establish relationships within the source point cloud, as well as the relationships and attention scores between the source and target point clouds. This approach is specifically designed for the task of point cloud registration. Finally, we search for the maximum overlap area by matching the spatial consistency between points and calculate the 3D transformation matrix to complete the registration process. Our method achieves an improvement in the inlier ratio and performs well on the 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch datasets, demonstrating high registration efficiency.