Latency-Aware Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception has recently shown great potential to improve perception capabilities over single-agent perception. Existing collaborative perception methods usually consider an ideal communication environment. However, in practice, the communication system inevitably suffers from latency issues, causing potential performance degradation and high risks in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving. To mitigate the effect caused by the inevitable communication latency, from a machine learning perspective, we present the first latency-aware collaborative perception system, which actively adopts asynchronous perceptual features from multiple agents to the same timestamp, promoting the robustness and effectiveness of collaboration. To achieve such a feature-level synchronization, we propose a novel latency compensation module, calledSyncNet, which leverages feature-attention symbiotic estimation and time modulation techniques. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art collaborative perception method by 15.6% on the latest collaborative perception dataset V2X-SIM.