The fusion of LiDAR and camera sensors has demonstrated significant effectiveness in achieving accurate detection for short-range tasks in autonomous driving. However, this fusion approach could face challenges when dealing with long-range detection scenarios due to disparity between sparsity of LiDAR and high-resolution camera data. Moreover, sensor corruption introduces complexities that affect the ability to maintain robustness, despite the growing adoption of sensor fusion in this domain. We present SaViD, a novel framework comprised of a three-stage fusion alignment mechanism designed to address long-range detection challenges in the presence of natural corruption. The SaViD framework consists of three key elements: the Global Memory Attention Network (GMAN), which enhances the extraction of image features through offering a deeper understanding of global patterns; the Attentional Sparse Memory Network (ASMN), which enhances the inte-gration of LiDAR and image features; and the KNNnectivity Graph Fusion (KGF), which enables the entire fusion of spatial information. SaViD achieves superior performance on the long-range detection Argoverse-2 (AV2) dataset with a performance improvement of 9.87% in AP value and an improvement of 2.39% in mAPH for L2 difficulties on the Waymo Open dataset (WOD). Comprehensive experiments are carried out to showcase its robustness against 14 natural sensor corruptions. SaViD exhibits a robust performance improvement of 31.43% for AV2 and 16.13% for WOD in RCE value compared to other existing fusion-based methods while considering all the corruptions for both datasets. Our code is available at SaVil).

The field of autonomous vehicles (AVs) predominantly leverages multi-modal integration of LiDAR and camera data to achieve better performance compared to using a single modality. However, the fusion process encounters challenges in detecting distant objects due to the disparity between the high resolution of cameras and the sparse data from LiDAR. Insufficient integration of global perspectives with local-level details results in sub-optimal fusion performance.To address this issue, we have developed an innovative two-stage fusion process called Quantum Inverse Contextual Vision Transformers (Q-ICVT). This approach leverages adiabatic computing in quantum concepts to create a novel reversible vision transformer known as the Global Adiabatic Transformer (GAT). GAT aggregates sparse LiDAR features with semantic features in dense images for cross-modal integration in a global form. Additionally, the Sparse Expert of Local Fusion (SELF) module maps the sparse LiDAR 3D proposals and encodes position information of the raw point cloud onto the dense camera feature space using a gating point fusion approach. Our experiments show that Q-ICVT achieves an mAPH of 82.54 for L2 difficulties on the Waymo dataset, improving by 1.88% over current state-of-the-art fusion methods. We also analyze GAT and SELF in ablation studies to highlight the impact of Q-ICVT. Our code is available at https://github.com/sanjay-810/Qicvt

Combining LiDAR and camera data has shown potential in enhancing short-distance object detection in autonomous driving systems. Yet, the fusion encounters difficulties with extended distance detection due to the contrast between LiDAR’s sparse data and the dense resolution of cameras. Besides, discrepancies in the two data representations further complicate fusion methods. We introduce AYDIV, a novel framework integrating a tri-phase alignment process specifically designed to enhance long-distance detection even amidst data discrepancies. AYDIV consists of the Global Contextual Fusion Alignment Transformer (GCFAT), which improves the extraction of camera features and provides a deeper understanding of large-scale patterns; the Sparse Fused Feature Attention (SFFA), which fine-tunes the fusion of LiDAR and camera details; and the Volumetric Grid Attention (VGA) for a comprehensive spatial data fusion. AYDIV’s performance on the Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) with an improvement of 1.24% in mAPH value(L2 difficulty) and the Argoverse2 Dataset with a performance improvement of 7.40% in AP value demonstrates its efficacy in comparison to other existing fusion-based methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sanjay-810/AYDIV2