Toward Collaborative Occlusion-Free Perception in Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Zhu Xiao, Jinmei Shu, Hongbo Jiang, Geyong Min, Jinwen Liang, Arun Iyengar

Abstract: In connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), the driving safety can be greatly deteriorated, in the presence of occlusions which are adverse to CAVs’ perception of region-of-interest (RoI). Collaborative perception on the basis the information sharing of occlusions among CAVs, in a real-time and accurate manner, provides a means of the occlusion-free RoI perception for safe driving. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of Collaborative Occlusion-free Perception (COFP) in CAVs, to regain the real-time and accurate occlusion awareness. The innovative COFP targets two goals: well-balanced computation resource allocation, as well as fast and high-quality RoI information fusion. Specifically, the resource allocation problem, with the objective of minimizing CAVs’ completion delay, is formulated as a multi-player continuous potential game and solved by a better response dynamics (BRD) algorithm. The RoI information fusion, with the objective of maximizing the overall object depiction quality, is formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, and solved by a modified discrete salp swarm (MDSSA) algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed COFP with 5 GHz computing power can achieve full occlusion awareness for CAVs with 69.61% completion time reduction and 19.03% fusion quality improvement, compared to the existing methods.