Goto

Collaborating Authors

 adverse weather


K-Radar: 4D Radar Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Various Weather Conditions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unfortunately, existing Radar datasets only contain a relatively small number of samples compared to the existing camera and Lidar datasets. This may hinder the development of sophisticated data-driven deep learning techniques for Radar-based perception. Moreover, most of the existing Radar datasets only provide 3D Radar tensor (3DRT) data that contain power measurements along the Doppler, range, and azimuth dimensions. As there is no elevation information, it is challenging to estimate the 3D bounding box of an object from 3DRT. In this work, we introduce KAIST-Radar (K-Radar), a novel large-scale object detection dataset and benchmark that contains 35K frames of 4D Radar tensor (4DRT) data with power measurements along the Doppler, range, azimuth, and elevation dimensions, together with carefully annotated 3D bounding box labels of objects on the roads. K-Radar includes challenging driving conditions such as adverse weathers (fog, rain, and snow) on various road structures (urban, suburban roads, alleyways, and highways). In addition to the 4DRT, we provide auxiliary measurements from carefully calibrated high-resolution Lidars, surround stereo cameras, and RTK-GPS. We also provide 4DRT-based object detection baseline neural networks (baseline NNs) and show that the height information is crucial for 3D object detection. And by comparing the baseline NN with a similarly-structured Lidar-based neural network, we demonstrate that 4D Radar is a more robust sensor for adverse weather conditions.


Towards Generalized Range-View LiDAR Segmentation in Adverse Weather

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LiDAR segmentation has emerged as an important task to enrich scene perception and understanding. Range-view-based methods have gained popularity due to their high computational efficiency and compatibility with real-time deployment. However, their generalized performance under adverse weather conditions remains underexplored, limiting their reliability in real-world environments. In this work, we identify and analyze the unique challenges that affect the generalization of range-view LiDAR segmentation in severe weather. To address these challenges, we propose a modular and lightweight framework that enhances robustness without altering the core architecture of existing models. Our method reformulates the initial stem block of standard range-view networks into two branches to process geometric attributes and reflectance intensity separately. Specifically, a Geometric Abnormality Suppression (GAS) module reduces the influence of weather-induced spatial noise, and a Reflectance Distortion Calibration (RDC) module corrects reflectance distortions through memory-guided adaptive instance normalization. The processed features are then fused and passed to the original segmentation pipeline. Extensive experiments on different benchmarks and baseline models demonstrate that our approach significantly improves generalization to adverse weather with minimal inference overhead, offering a practical and effective solution for real-world LiDAR segmentation.


End-to-End Video Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather using Fusion Blocks and Temporal-Spatial Teacher-Student Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Adverse weather conditions can significantly degrade the video frames, causing existing video semantic segmentation methods to produce erroneous predictions. In this work, we target adverse weather conditions and introduce an end-to-end domain adaptation strategy that leverages a fusion block, temporal-spatial teacher-student learning, and a temporal weather degradation augmentation approach. The fusion block integrates temporal information from adjacent frames at the feature level, trained end-to-end, eliminating the need for pretrained optical flow, distinguishing our method from existing approaches. Our teacher-student approach involves two teachers: one focuses on exploring temporal information from adjacent frames, and the other harnesses spatial information from the current frame. Finally, we apply temporal weather degradation augmentation to consecutive frames to more accurately represent adverse weather degradations.


Always Clear Depth: Robust Monocular Depth Estimation under Adverse Weather

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Monocular depth estimation is critical for applications such as autonomous driving and scene reconstruction. While existing methods perform well under normal scenarios, their performance declines in adverse weather, due to challenging domain shifts and difficulties in extracting scene information. To address this issue, we present a robust monocular depth estimation method called \textbf{ACDepth} from the perspective of high-quality training data generation and domain adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a one-step diffusion model for generating samples that simulate adverse weather conditions, constructing a multi-tuple degradation dataset during training. To ensure the quality of the generated degradation samples, we employ LoRA adapters to fine-tune the generation weights of diffusion model. Additionally, we integrate circular consistency loss and adversarial training to guarantee the fidelity and naturalness of the scene contents. Furthermore, we elaborate on a multi-granularity knowledge distillation strategy (MKD) that encourages the student network to absorb knowledge from both the teacher model and pretrained Depth Anything V2. This strategy guides the student model in learning degradation-agnostic scene information from various degradation inputs. In particular, we introduce an ordinal guidance distillation mechanism (OGD) that encourages the network to focus on uncertain regions through differential ranking, leading to a more precise depth estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our ACDepth surpasses md4all-DD by 2.50\% for night scene and 2.61\% for rainy scene on the nuScenes dataset in terms of the absRel metric.


No Thing, Nothing: Highlighting Safety-Critical Classes for Robust LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Adverse Weather

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Existing domain generalization methods for LiDAR semantic segmentation under adverse weather struggle to accurately predict "things" categories compared to "stuff" categories. In typical driving scenes, "things" categories can be dynamic and associated with higher collision risks, making them crucial for safe navigation and planning. Recognizing the importance of "things" categories, we identify their performance drop as a serious bottleneck in existing approaches. We observed that adverse weather induces degradation of semantic-level features and both corruption of local features, leading to a misprediction of "things" as "stuff". To mitigate these corruptions, we suggest our method, NTN - segmeNt Things for No-accident. To address semantic-level feature corruption, we bind each point feature to its superclass, preventing the misprediction of things classes into visually dissimilar categories. Additionally, to enhance robustness against local corruption caused by adverse weather, we define each LiDAR beam as a local region and propose a regularization term that aligns the clean data with its corrupted counterpart in feature space. NTN achieves state-of-the-art performance with a +2.6 mIoU gain on the SemanticKITTI-to-SemanticSTF benchmark and +7.9 mIoU on the SemanticPOSS-to-SemanticSTF benchmark. Notably, NTN achieves a +4.8 and +7.9 mIoU improvement on "things" classes, respectively, highlighting its effectiveness.


K-Radar: 4D Radar Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Various Weather Conditions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Unfortunately, existing Radar datasets only contain a relatively small number of samples compared to the existing camera and Lidar datasets. This may hinder the development of sophisticated data-driven deep learning techniques for Radar-based perception. Moreover, most of the existing Radar datasets only provide 3D Radar tensor (3DRT) data that contain power measurements along the Doppler, range, and azimuth dimensions. As there is no elevation information, it is challenging to estimate the 3D bounding box of an object from 3DRT. In this work, we introduce KAIST-Radar (K-Radar), a novel large-scale object detection dataset and benchmark that contains 35K frames of 4D Radar tensor (4DRT) data with power measurements along the Doppler, range, azimuth, and elevation dimensions, together with carefully annotated 3D bounding box labels of objects on the roads.


Prepared for the Worst: A Learning-Based Adversarial Attack for Resilience Analysis of the ICP Algorithm

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a novel method to assess the resilience of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm via deep-learning-based attacks on lidar point clouds. For safety-critical applications such as autonomous navigation, ensuring the resilience of algorithms prior to deployments is of utmost importance. The ICP algorithm has become the standard for lidar-based localization. However, the pose estimate it produces can be greatly affected by corruption in the measurements. Corruption can arise from a variety of scenarios such as occlusions, adverse weather, or mechanical issues in the sensor. Unfortunately, the complex and iterative nature of ICP makes assessing its resilience to corruption challenging. While there have been efforts to create challenging datasets and develop simulations to evaluate the resilience of ICP empirically, our method focuses on finding the maximum possible ICP pose error using perturbation-based adversarial attacks. The proposed attack induces significant pose errors on ICP and outperforms baselines more than 88% of the time across a wide range of scenarios. As an example application, we demonstrate that our attack can be used to identify areas on a map where ICP is particularly vulnerable to corruption in the measurements.


WeatherDepth: Curriculum Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Depth Estimation under Adverse Weather Conditions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Depth estimation models have shown promising performance on clear scenes but fail to generalize to adverse weather conditions due to illumination variations, weather particles, etc. In this paper, we propose WeatherDepth, a self-supervised robust depth estimation model with curriculum contrastive learning, to tackle performance degradation in complex weather conditions. Concretely, we first present a progressive curriculum learning scheme with three simple-to-complex curricula to gradually adapt the model from clear to relative adverse, and then to adverse weather scenes. It encourages the model to gradually grasp beneficial depth cues against the weather effect, yielding smoother and better domain adaption. Meanwhile, to prevent the model from forgetting previous curricula, we integrate contrastive learning into different curricula. Drawn the reference knowledge from the previous course, our strategy establishes a depth consistency constraint between different courses towards robust depth estimation in diverse weather. Besides, to reduce manual intervention and better adapt to different models, we designed an adaptive curriculum scheduler to automatically search for the best timing for course switching. In the experiment, the proposed solution is proven to be easily incorporated into various architectures and demonstrates state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on both synthetic and real weather datasets.


Towards Robust 3D Object Detection In Rainy Conditions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LiDAR sensors are used in autonomous driving applications to accurately perceive the environment. However, they are affected by adverse weather conditions such as snow, fog, and rain. These everyday phenomena introduce unwanted noise into the measurements, severely degrading the performance of LiDAR-based perception systems. In this work, we propose a framework for improving the robustness of LiDAR-based 3D object detectors against road spray. Our approach uses a state-of-the-art adverse weather detection network to filter out spray from the LiDAR point cloud, which is then used as input for the object detector. In this way, the detected objects are less affected by the adverse weather in the scene, resulting in a more accurate perception of the environment. In addition to adverse weather filtering, we explore the use of radar targets to further filter false positive detections. Tests on real-world data show that our approach improves the robustness to road spray of several popular 3D object detectors.


Counting Crowds in Bad Weather

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Crowd counting has recently attracted significant attention in the field of computer vision due to its wide applications to image understanding. Numerous methods have been proposed and achieved state-of-the-art performance for real-world tasks. However, existing approaches do not perform well under adverse weather such as haze, rain, and snow since the visual appearances of crowds in such scenes are drastically different from those images in clear weather of typical datasets. In this paper, we propose a method for robust crowd counting in adverse weather scenarios. Instead of using a two-stage approach that involves image restoration and crowd counting modules, our model learns effective features and adaptive queries to account for large appearance variations. With these weather queries, the proposed model can learn the weather information according to the degradation of the input image and optimize with the crowd counting module simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective in counting crowds under different weather types on benchmark datasets. The source code and trained models will be made available to the public.