The paper introduces FlexDepth, a family of self‑supervised monocular depth estimation models designed for robust driving perception. FlexDepth uses a two‑stage static‑dynamic decoupled training strategy and a Scale‑Driven Decoder that selects components based on scale size, enabling efficient feature fusion and high‑precision depth maps. Experiments on driving benchmarks show state‑of‑the‑art performance across arbitrary scales with minimal computational cost, with the smallest model (Flex‑Nano) achieving 37.6 FPS on mobile devices.
Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) has garnered attention in recent years due to its independence from ground truth. However, most existing models are limited to a single scale and exhibit considerable performance degradation in complex driving environments.
Monocular depth estimation has seen remarkable progress through foundation models achieving robust zero-shot generalization, yet their computational demands place them far beyond the reach of embedded and mobile platforms. Lightweight alternatives exist, but have been developed almost exclusively within single-domain, self-supervised paradigms, failing silently under domain shift.
arXiv:2608.13147v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Camera-based autonomous driving perception requires a shared representation that preserves metric 3D structure across synchronized multi-camera str...
HENet++ is a unified framework that combines a hybrid image encoding strategy—using a large encoder for short‑term frames and a lightweight encoder for long‑term temporal context—to balance accuracy and efficiency in 3D perception for autonomous driving. It jointly extracts dense background and sparse foreground features, enabling task‑specific representations that reduce cumulative errors and enrich downstream prediction and planning modules. The approach supports diverse 3D feature extraction pipelines, multi‑modal inputs (camera and radar), and achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on nuScenes and NAVSIM benchmarks, including the lowest collision rate on nuScenes planning.
The paper presents a foundation-guided auto‑annotation pipeline that improves standard autonomous driving object detectors in adverse weather. By benchmarking YOLOv8, Co‑DETR, and SAM3 on a custom dataset of 25 operational scenarios, the authors find SAM3 to be the most robust and use it offline to generate pseudo‑labels. Fine‑tuning YOLOv8 on these labels boosts overall mAP by 16.04% and yields significant gains in specific conditions such as Residential Direct Sunlight (32.73%) and Highway Fog (28.65%).
The paper introduces a biologically inspired framework that learns object‑centric visual representations from raw videos without human annotations or camera calibration. By using motion boundaries detected via optical flow and clustering to create pseudo‑instance masks, the method supervises a single‑image encoder with pixel‑level pairwise metric learning. Training on 195 million pseudo‑labeled frames and expanding to 421 million frames through Motion‑Verified Self‑Training, the approach yields Swin‑based encoders that outperform or match supervised and self‑supervised baselines on tasks such as monocular depth estimation, 3D object detection, 3D occupancy prediction, and end‑to‑end planning.
arXiv:2607. 07885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic obstacle avoidance in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous mobile robots, particularly when large-scale robot-specific training data and simulation-based policies are impractical.
FedCKA introduces a Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA)-based method for federated 3D perception that dynamically balances personalization and globalization. By computing layer-wise feature similarities between local client models and a global consensus model, FedCKA generates client‑specific aggregation masks to selectively share representation‑consistent layers. Experiments on a unified multi‑domain nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that FedCKA surpasses established federated baselines, improving average NDS by 7 percentage points.
LiteViLNet is a lightweight RGB‑geometry fusion network for road segmentation that uses a MobileNetV3 RGB encoder and a tiny depth‑wise‑separable geometry encoder. Its multi‑scale fusion module enhances modality‑specific features, performs cross‑modal interaction, and applies adaptive gating, while a depth‑wise large‑kernel bridge expands contextual support with minimal overhead. The U‑Net‑style decoder is trained with deep supervision, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on KITTI and ORFD benchmarks and running at up to 68.73 FPS on a Jetson Orin NX with TensorRT FP16.
Foundation4D is a unified feed‑forward model that performs geometry estimation, 3D detection, semantic occupancy, and Gaussian reconstruction from multi‑camera driving video. It uses a shared backbone with factorized spatiotemporal attention to merge observations across cameras and time, and a video inference pipeline that refines camera trajectories via pose graph optimization and assembles object tracks. The authors also provide a data annotation pipeline and release the PAI‑Foundation4D benchmark, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on depth, detection, and occupancy metrics and demonstrating that co‑training detection with geometry and occupancy improves performance.
arXiv:2606. 01277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current end-to-end autonomous driving systems predominantly rely on frame-based sensors, which suffer from inherent perception latency and motion blur during highly dynamic encounters, specifically sudden pedestrian crossings.
arXiv:2607. 22714v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time perception is a foundational requirement for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles, yet embedded automotive platforms impose severe constraints on compute, memory, and power.