Evaluation of an Uncertainty-Aware Late Fusion Algorithm for Multi-Source Bird's Eye View Detections Under Controlled Noise

--Reliable multi-source fusion is crucial for robust perception in autonomous systems. However, evaluating fusion performance independently of detection errors remains challenging. This work introduces a systematic evaluation framework that injects controlled noise into ground-truth bounding boxes to isolate the fusion process. We then propose Unified Kalman Fusion (UniKF), a late-fusion algorithm based on Kalman filtering to merge Bird's Eye View (BEV) detections while handling synchronization issues. Experiments show that UniKF outperforms baseline methods across various noise levels, achieving up to 3 lower object's positioning and orientation errors and 2 lower dimension estimation errors, while maintaining near-perfect precision and recall between 99. 5% and 100%. Accurate perception is fundamental for autonomous driving, especially in complex urban settings where sensor occlusions, limited range, and adverse weather degrade detection quality [1]. Collaborative perception, enabled by onboard sensors' communication and V ehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, enhances perception by sharing sensor data across multiple sensors or agents [2], [3]. Early fusion methods require high bandwidth and strict time synchronization. Deep fusion demands access to proprietary models, which is impractical due to privacy and intellectual property restrictions. Late fusion, which operates at the object detection level, offers a scalable, bandwidth-efficient, and detector-model-agnostic alternative.