A Survey on Occupancy Perception for Autonomous Driving: The Information Fusion Perspective

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in 3D occupancy perception for autonomous vehicles, emphasizing information fusion techniques, methodologies, and performance evaluation on key datasets, highlighting challenges and future directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of 3D occupancy perception methods, analyzing input modalities, network architectures, fusion strategies, and performance benchmarks, which is novel in consolidating recent research.

Findings

State-of-the-art methods achieve high accuracy on popular datasets.

Information fusion significantly improves perception performance.

Challenges include data complexity and real-time processing requirements.

Abstract

3D occupancy perception technology aims to observe and understand dense 3D environments for autonomous vehicles. Owing to its comprehensive perception capability, this technology is emerging as a trend in autonomous driving perception systems, and is attracting significant attention from both industry and academia. Similar to traditional bird's-eye view (BEV) perception, 3D occupancy perception has the nature of multi-source input and the necessity for information fusion. However, the difference is that it captures vertical structures that are ignored by 2D BEV. In this survey, we review the most recent works on 3D occupancy perception, and provide in-depth analyses of methodologies with various input modalities. Specifically, we summarize general network pipelines, highlight information fusion techniques, and discuss effective network training. We evaluate and analyze the occupancy perception performance of the state-of-the-art on the most popular datasets. Furthermore, challenges and future research directions are discussed. We hope this paper will inspire the community and encourage more research work on 3D occupancy perception. A comprehensive list of studies in this survey is publicly available in an active repository that continuously collects the latest work: https://github.com/HuaiyuanXu/3D-Occupancy-Perception.