Multi-Camera Calibration Free BEV Representation for 3D Object Detection

Abstract: In advanced paradigms of autonomous driving, learning Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation from surrounding views is crucial for multi-task framework. However, existing methods based on depth estimation or camera-driven attention are not stable to obtain transformation under noisy camera parameters, mainly with two challenges, accurate depth prediction and calibration. In this work, we present a completely Multi-Camera Calibration Free Transformer (CFT) for robust BEV representation, which focuses on exploring implicit mapping, not relied on camera intrinsics and extrinsics. To guide better feature learning from image views to BEV, CFT mines potential 3D information in BEV via our designed position-aware enhancement (PA). Instead of camera-driven point-wise or global transformation, for interaction within more effective region and lower computation cost, we propose a view-aware attention which also reduces redundant computation and promotes converge. CFT achieves 49.7% NDS on the nuScenes detection task leaderboard, which is the first work removing camera parameters, comparable to other geometry-guided methods. Without temporal input and other modal information, CFT achieves second highest performance with a smaller image input 1600 * 640. Thanks to view-attention variant, CFT reduces memory and transformer FLOPs for vanilla attention by about 12% and 60%, respectively, with improved NDS by 1.0%. Moreover, its natural robustness to noisy camera parameters makes CFT more competitive.