UA-PnP: Uncertainty-Aware End-to-End Bird's Eye View Visual Perception and Prediction for Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Robust and accurate perception and prediction of the driving scenarios are crucial for autonomous driving vehicles (ADV). State-of-the-art ADV frameworks have evolved from conventional modular design to an end-to-end (E2E) pipeline that enables joint feature learning and optimization. However, the evaluation of uncertainties in the intermediate features propagated between perception and prediction units is missing in current E2E pipelines. Consequently, adverse and extreme environment factors may incur highly untrustworthy features that ultimately result in degraded perception and prediction. In this work, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware E2E visual perception and prediction framework that utilized Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations. A feature distribution estimation network is introduced to explicitly quantify the uncertainties in the intermediate BEV features extracted from the images. To better exploit temporal information and generate more robust features for scene prediction, an uncertainty-aware transformer is designed to utilize the guidance of the quantified feature uncertainty via the attention mechanism. In addition, an evidential decoder generates accurate future instance segmentations along with the associated uncertainties. Comprehensive experiments conducted on real-world dataset validate the superiority of our proposed framework over conventional pipelines. Codes are available at: https://github.com/Huang121381/UAPnP.