TY - GEN

T1 - SparseAlign

T2 - A Fully Sparse Framework for Cooperative Object Detection

AU - Yuan, Yunshuang

AU - Xia, Yan

AU - Cremers, Daniel

AU - Sester, Monika

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025 IEEE.

PY - 2025/6/10

Y1 - 2025/6/10

N2 - Cooperative perception can increase the view field and decrease the occlusion of an ego vehicle, hence improving the perception performance and safety of autonomous driving. Despite the success of previous works on cooperative object detection, they mostly operate on dense Bird's Eye View (BEV) feature maps, which are computationally demanding and can hardly be extended to long-range detection problems. More efficient fully sparse frameworks are rarely explored. In this work, we design a fully sparse framework, SparseAlign, with three key features: an enhanced sparse 3D backbone, a query-based temporal context learning module, and a robust detection head specially tailored for sparse features. Extensive experimental results on both OPV2V and DairV2X datasets show that our framework, despite its sparsity, outperforms the state of the art with less communication bandwidth requirements. In addition, experiments on the OPV2Vt and DairV2Xt datasets for time-aligned cooperative object detection also show a significant performance gain compared to the baseline works.

AB - Cooperative perception can increase the view field and decrease the occlusion of an ego vehicle, hence improving the perception performance and safety of autonomous driving. Despite the success of previous works on cooperative object detection, they mostly operate on dense Bird's Eye View (BEV) feature maps, which are computationally demanding and can hardly be extended to long-range detection problems. More efficient fully sparse frameworks are rarely explored. In this work, we design a fully sparse framework, SparseAlign, with three key features: an enhanced sparse 3D backbone, a query-based temporal context learning module, and a robust detection head specially tailored for sparse features. Extensive experimental results on both OPV2V and DairV2X datasets show that our framework, despite its sparsity, outperforms the state of the art with less communication bandwidth requirements. In addition, experiments on the OPV2Vt and DairV2Xt datasets for time-aligned cooperative object detection also show a significant performance gain compared to the baseline works.

KW - cs.CV

KW - data fusion

KW - cooperative perception

KW - point cloud

KW - autonomous driving

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105017064770&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1109/CVPR52734.2025.02077

DO - 10.1109/CVPR52734.2025.02077

M3 - Conference contribution

SN - 979-8-3315-4364-8

T3 - CVPR

SP - 22296

EP - 22305

BT - 2025 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

ER -