Calibration-Free BEV Representation for Infrastructure Perception

Effective BEV object detection on infrastructure can greatly improve traffic scene understanding and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) cooperative perception. However, cameras installed on infrastructure have various postures, and previous BEV detection methods rely on accurate calibration, which is difficult for practical applications due to inevitable natural factors (e.g., wind and snow). In this paper, we propose a Calibration-free BEV Representation (CBR) network, which achieves 3D detection based on BEV representation without calibration parameters and additional depth supervision. Specifically, we utilize two multi-layer perceptrons for decoupling the features from perspective view to front view and bird-eye view under boxes-induced foreground supervision. Then, a cross-view feature fusion module matches features from orthogonal views according to similarity and conducts BEV feature enhancement with front-view features. Experimental results on DAIR-V2X demonstrate that CBR achieves acceptable performance without any camera parameters and is naturally not affected by calibration noises. We hope CBR can serve as a baseline for future research addressing practical challenges of infrastructure perception.