ViewFormer: Exploring Spatiotemporal Modeling for Multi-View 3D Occupancy Perception via View-Guided Transformers

TL;DR

ViewFormer introduces a transformer-based framework utilizing view-guided attention for improved multi-view 3D occupancy perception, effectively aggregating spatial and temporal features to enhance dynamic scene understanding.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel view attention mechanism and a scalable transformer framework for multi-view 3D occupancy perception, along with a new benchmark for occupancy flow.

Findings

Outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in 3D occupancy tasks

Effectively models dynamic scenes with fine-grained flow representation

Demonstrates scalability across multiple multi-view 3D perception tasks

Abstract

3D occupancy, an advanced perception technology for driving scenarios, represents the entire scene without distinguishing between foreground and background by quantifying the physical space into a grid map. The widely adopted projection-first deformable attention, efficient in transforming image features into 3D representations, encounters challenges in aggregating multi-view features due to sensor deployment constraints. To address this issue, we propose our learning-first view attention mechanism for effective multi-view feature aggregation. Moreover, we showcase the scalability of our view attention across diverse multi-view 3D tasks, including map construction and 3D object detection. Leveraging the proposed view attention as well as an additional multi-frame streaming temporal attention, we introduce ViewFormer, a vision-centric transformer-based framework for spatiotemporal feature aggregation. To further explore occupancy-level flow representation, we present FlowOcc3D, a benchmark built on top of existing high-quality datasets. Qualitative and quantitative analyses on this benchmark reveal the potential to represent fine-grained dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/ViewFormerOcc/ViewFormer-Occ}.