Nvidia Corporation

Nec Laboratories America, Inc.

Nec Corporation

Tesla, Inc.

Neda Cvijetic

Ting Wang

David Nister

Minwoo Park

Berta Rodriguez Hervas

Trung Pham

Hae-Jong Seo

Milorad Cvijetic

Narayan Prasad

Konstantinos Kanonakis

Akihiro Tanaka

Philip N Ji

Dayou Qian

Giovanni Milione

Xiaolin Lin

Hang Dou

Ezra Ip

Ankitkumar N Patel

Jingjing Zhang

Ibrahim Eden

Junghyun Kwon

Mark Jonathon McClelland

Davide Onofrio

Francis Havlak

Igor Tryndin

Maria Ioanna Angelou

Robert Cofield

Zeljko Popovic

Sayed Mehdi Sajjadi Mohammadabadi

Sampath Rangarajan

Xu Li

Ivan B Djordjevic

Junqiang Nochur Hu

Yue-Kai Huang

Ming-Fang Huang

Sangmin Oh

Michael Kroepfl

Vaibhav Thukral

Ruchi Bhargava

Joachim Pehserl

Michael Grabner

Yizhou Wang

Tilman Wekel

Birgit Henke

Youding Zhu

Amir Akbarzadeh

Abhishek Bajpayee

Yu Sheng

Ivana Stojanovic

Jeffrey Liu

Andrew Carley

Enliang Zheng

Zhenyi Zhang

Vadim Cugunovs

Akihoro Tanaka

Jordan Marr

Jing Wang

Ming Zhu

In various examples, live perception from sensors of a vehicle may be leveraged to detect and classify intersection contention areas in an environment of a vehicle in real-time or near real-time. For example, a deep neural network (DNN) may be trained to compute outputs—such as signed distance functions—that may correspond to locations of boundaries delineating intersection contention areas. The signed distance functions may be decoded and/or post-processed to determine instance segmentation masks representing locations and classifications of intersection areas or regions. The locations of the intersections areas or regions may be generated in image-space and converted to world-space coordinates to aid an autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicle in navigating intersections according to rules of the road, traffic priority considerations, and/or the like.

Intersection region detection and classification for autonomous machine applications

In various examples, a three-dimensional (3D) intersection structure may be predicted using a deep neural network (DNN) based on processing two-dimensional (2D) input data. To train the DNN to accurately predict 3D intersection structures from 2D inputs, the DNN may be trained using a first loss function that compares 3D outputs of the DNN—after conversion to 2D space—to 2D ground truth data and a second loss function that analyzes the 3D predictions of the DNN in view of one or more geometric constraints—e.g., geometric knowledge of intersections may be used to penalize predictions of the DNN that do not align with known intersection and/or road structure geometries. As such, live perception of an autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicle may be used by the DNN to detect 3D locations of intersection structures from 2D inputs.

Three-dimensional intersection structure prediction for autonomous driving applications

In various examples, systems and methods are disclosed that preserve rich spatial information from an input resolution of a machine learning model to regress on lines in an input image. The machine learning model may be trained to predict, in deployment, distances for each pixel of the input image at an input resolution to a line pixel determined to correspond to a line in the input image. The machine learning model may further be trained to predict angles and label classes of the line. An embedding algorithm may be used to train the machine learning model to predict clusters of line pixels that each correspond to a respective line in the input image. In deployment, the predictions of the machine learning model may be used as an aid for understanding the surrounding environment—e.g., for updating a world model—in a variety of autonomous machine applications.

Regression-based line detection for autonomous driving machines

In various examples, a path perception ensemble is used to produce a more accurate and reliable understanding of a driving surface and/or a path there through. For example, an analysis of a plurality of path perception inputs provides testability and reliability for accurate and redundant lane mapping and/or path planning in real-time or near real-time. By incorporating a plurality of separate path perception computations, a means of metricizing path perception correctness, quality, and reliability is provided by analyzing whether and how much the individual path perception signals agree or disagree. By implementing this approach—where individual path perception inputs fail in almost independent ways—a system failure is less statistically likely. In addition, with diversity and redundancy in path perception, comfortable lane keeping on high curvature roads, under severe road conditions, and/or at complex intersections.

Path perception diversity and redundancy in autonomous machine applications

In various examples, live perception from sensors of a vehicle may be leveraged to generate potential paths for the vehicle to navigate an intersection in real-time or near real-time. For example, a deep neural network (DNN) may be trained to compute various outputs—such as heat maps corresponding to key points associated with the intersection, vector fields corresponding to directionality, heading, and offsets with respect to lanes, intensity maps corresponding to widths of lanes, and/or classifications corresponding to line segments of the intersection. The outputs may be decoded and/or otherwise post-processed to reconstruct an intersection—or key points corresponding thereto—and to determine proposed or potential paths for navigating the vehicle through the intersection.

Intersection pose detection in autonomous machine applications

In various examples, a deep neural network (DNN) may be used to detect and classify animate objects and/or parts of an environment. The DNN may be trained using camera-to-LiDAR cross injection to generate reliable ground truth data for LiDAR range images. For example, annotations generated in the image domain may be propagated to the LiDAR domain to increase the accuracy of the ground truth data in the LiDAR domain—e.g., without requiring manual annotation in the LiDAR domain. Once trained, the DNN may output instance segmentation masks, class segmentation masks, and/or bounding shape proposals corresponding to two-dimensional (2D) LiDAR range images, and the outputs may be fused together to project the outputs into three-dimensional (3D) LiDAR point clouds. This 2D and/or 3D information output by the DNN may be provided to an autonomous vehicle drive stack to enable safe planning and control of the autonomous vehicle.

Object detection and classification using LiDAR range images for autonomous machine applications

In various examples, live perception from sensors of a vehicle may be leveraged to detect and classify intersections in an environment of a vehicle in real-time or near real-time. For example, a deep neural network (DNN) may be trained to compute various outputs—such as bounding box coordinates for intersections, intersection coverage maps corresponding to the bounding boxes, intersection attributes, distances to intersections, and/or distance coverage maps associated with the intersections. The outputs may be decoded and/or post-processed to determine final locations of, distances to, and/or attributes of the detected intersections.

Intersection detection and classification in autonomous machine applications

In various examples, sensor data may be collected using one or more sensors of an ego-vehicle to generate a representation of an environment surrounding the ego-vehicle. The representation may include lanes of the roadway and object locations within the lanes. The representation of the environment may be provided as input to a longitudinal speed profile identifier, which may project a plurality of longitudinal speed profile candidates onto a target lane. Each of the plurality of longitudinal speed profiles candidates may be evaluated one or more times based on one or more sets of criteria. Using scores from the evaluation, a target gap and a particular longitudinal speed profile from the longitudinal speed profile candidates may be selected. Once the longitudinal speed profile for a target gap has been determined, the system may execute a lane change maneuver according to the longitudinal speed profile.

Lane change planning and control in autonomous machine applications

An end-to-end system for data generation, map creation using the generated data, and localization to the created map is disclosed. Mapstreams&#x2014;or streams of sensor data, perception outputs from deep neural networks (DNNs), and/or relative trajectory data&#x2014;corresponding to any number of drives by any number of vehicles may be generated and uploaded to the cloud. The mapstreams may be used to generate map data&#x2014;and ultimately a fused high definition (HD) map&#x2014;that represents data generated over a plurality of drives. When localizing to the fused HD map, individual localization results may be generated based on comparisons of real-time data from a sensor modality to map data corresponding to the same sensor modality. This process may be repeated for any number of sensor modalities and the results may be fused together to determine a final fused localization result.

Map creation and localization for autonomous driving applications

In various examples, live perception from sensors of a vehicle may be leveraged to detect and classify intersections in an environment of a vehicle in real-time or near real-time. For example, a deep neural network (DNN) may be trained to compute various outputs&#x2014;such as bounding box coordinates for intersections, intersection coverage maps corresponding to the bounding boxes, intersection attributes, distances to intersections, and/or distance coverage maps associated with the intersections. The outputs may be decoded and/or post-processed to determine final locations of, distances to, and/or attributes of the detected intersections.

In various examples, systems and methods are disclosed that preserve rich spatial information from an input resolution of a machine learning model to regress on lines in an input image. The machine learning model may be trained to predict, in deployment, distances for each pixel of the input image at an input resolution to a line pixel determined to correspond to a line in the input image. The machine learning model may further be trained to predict angles and label classes of the line. An embedding algorithm may be used to train the machine learning model to predict clusters of line pixels that each correspond to a respective line in the input image. In deployment, the predictions of the machine learning model may be used as an aid for understanding the surrounding environment&#x2014;e.g., for updating a world model&#x2014;in a variety of autonomous machine applications.

In various examples, a path perception ensemble is used to produce a more accurate and reliable understanding of a driving surface and/or a path there through. For example, an analysis of a plurality of path perception inputs provides testability and reliability for accurate and redundant lane mapping and/or path planning in real-time or near real-time. By incorporating a plurality of separate path perception computations, a means of metricizing path perception correctness, quality, and reliability is provided by analyzing whether and how much the individual path perception signals agree or disagree. By implementing this approach&#x2014;where individual path perception inputs fail in almost independent ways&#x2014;a system failure is less statistically likely. In addition, with diversity and redundancy in path perception, comfortable lane keeping on high curvature roads, under severe road conditions, and/or at complex intersections, as well as autonomous negotiation of turns at intersections, may be enabled.

In various examples, a deep neural network (DNN) is trained for sensor blindness detection using a region and context-based approach. Using sensor data, the DNN may compute locations of blindness or compromised visibility regions as well as associated blindness classifications and/or blindness attributes associated therewith. In addition, the DNN may predict a usability of each instance of the sensor data for performing one or more operations&#x2014;such as operations associated with semi-autonomous or autonomous driving. The combination of the outputs of the DNN may be used to filter out instances of the sensor data&#x2014;or to filter out portions of instances of the sensor data determined to be compromised&#x2014;that may lead to inaccurate or ineffective results for the one or more operations of the system.

Deep neural network processing for sensor blindness detection in autonomous machine applications

Growing community of inventors

Plainsboro, NJ, United States of America

Neda Cvijetic