Edge Assisted Low-Latency Cooperative BEV Perception With Progressive State Estimation

Abstract

Modern intelligent vehicles (IVs) are equipped with a variety of sensors and communication modules, empowering Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and enabling inter-vehicle connectivity. This paper focuses on multi-vehicle cooperative perception, with a primary objective of achieving low latency. The task involves nearby cooperative vehicles sending their camera data to an edge server, which then merges the local views to create a global traffic view. While multi-camera perception has been actively researched, existing solutions often rely on deep learning models, resulting in excessive processing latency. In contrast, we propose leveraging the state estimation technique from the robotics field for this task. We explicitly model and solve for the system state, addressing additional challenges brought by object mobility and vision obstruction. Furthermore, we introduce a progressive state estimation pipeline to further accelerate system state notifications, supported by a motion prediction method that optimizes position accuracy and perception smoothness. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the deep learning method, with 12.0 × to 27.4 × reductions in server processing delay, while maintaining mean absolute errors below 1 m.