Weather-Aware Collaborative Perception With Uncertainty Reduction

Although collaborative 3D perception has successfully improved detection performance by sharing LIDAR information among multiple agents, its impact under adverse weather is under poor investigation. It is non-trivial to reduce the noise effect in the multi-agent system, as each agent may generate defective feature representations with aleatoric uncertainty, and such uncertainty will be further amplified in the collaborative stage due to deterministic collaboration models. To mitigate the negative effects of weather noise on the collaborative framework, we proposed a method called Co-Denoising, which incorporates a two-stage denoising approach within the intermediate collaborative framework. In our method, a sampling-based noise filtering is first performed at each agent to make a coarse denoising. Then, during the collaboration stage, the global feature representations are expanded through Bayesian neural networks to improve the robustness against environmental noise. The extensive experiments on sunny and rainy datasets have indicated the proposed collaborative perception method can significantly reduce performance degradation under adverse weather.