Ultra-fast semantic map perception model for autonomous driving

Abstract

Autonomous driving relies on real-time perception of environmental semantic maps to make decisions, accurate and real-time perception of environmental semantics is crucial for safe navigation, as well as for efficient construction of high-definition maps in the backend. Our research found that when the output space of the semantic map perception model is an orthogonal projection subspace of the input perception space, it significantly improves the accuracy and real-time performance of map semantic segmentation while reducing learning pressure on deep network models. Based on this, we propose a simple yet efficient semantic map segmentation network that aims to achieve extremely fast speed and precision. Furthermore, we implement a semantic map fusion process using a Bayesian framework that promotes global semantic information accumulation in local semantics over time and space. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving state-of-the-art performance in network speed and mIoU metrics. At the same spatial resolution of semantic maps, our method reaches over 350+ frames per second, which is at least 15 times faster than the previous state-of-the-art method. Code released at https://github.com/xzx-ai/MDSegMap.