A Unified Benchmark for Aerial-Enhanced Autonomous Driving: The KITScenes Aerial Dataset
Daniel Lengerer, Richard Schwarzkopf, Jonas Merkert, Fabian Immel, Rupert Polley, Frank Bieder, Jan-Hendrik Pauls, J. Marius Zöllner 等 11 位作者
AI 速览：作者提出 KITScenes Aerial，将同步车载传感器数据、车辆位姿与 Lanelet2 地图标注同空中影像关联起来，为空中辅助建图与跨视角定位提供统一基准。
Aerial imagery provides complementary spatial context for autonomous driving by exposing road structure beyond the immediate perception range of onboard sensors. Yet map construction from aerial imagery, aerial-assisted online HD mapping, and cross-view localization are typically studied on separate data and benchmarks. We introduce KITScenes Aerial, an extension of the KITScenes Multimodal dataset that augments synchronized onboard sensor data, vehicle poses, and rich Lanelet2 map annotations with spatially associated aerial imagery and higher-resolution neural representations, providing a common basis for a variety of research tasks. Our mapping evaluation focuses on all 53 KITScenes map classes across different model designs, spatial ranges, and aerial resolutions, while retaining compatibility with the widely used three-class setting. Representative baselines show that aerial context is particularly beneficial for fine-grained and extended-range mapping, more than doubling 53-class mAP at the larger mapping extent. Higher-resolution aerial imagery yields a further 4.3 mAP (+24 %) improvement, with gains extending to challenging map elements such as traffic lights. We additionally evaluate cross-view localization under geographically disjoint conditions, where an adapted fine-grained feature-matching baseline achieves a mean translation error of 5.13 m. KITScenes Aerial thus enables unified study of aerial and ground-level information across complementary mapping and localization tasks. Project page: https://kitscenes.com/aerial
Kaiwen Wang, Frank Bieder, Yinzhe Shen, Carlos Fernandez, Jan-Hendrik Pauls, Omer Sahin Tas
Simulation-to-reality translation must bridge the appearance gap between synthetic and real domains while preserving structural and semantic consistency. Conditioning-based methods achieve spatial alignment but introduce computationally expensive control modules. Paired-data methods achieve realism but rely on complex synthesis pipelines, often altering scene geometry and semantics. Training-free editing methods avoid both constraints but lack a learned appearance prior, limiting their perceptual quality. Recently proposed phase-preserving diffusion presents a promising alternative, but Fourier-domain formulations are constrained by global spectral coupling. This coupling induces spatial artifacts such as ringing and boundary leakage, thereby degrading structural and semantic consistency. We introduce Wavelet Phase Diffusion, which addresses this through two components. First, we operate in the Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Packet Transform domain, whose localized wavelet packets enable spatially adaptive phase injection without global spectral interference. Second, Low-Frequency Randomization (LFR) replaces the low-frequency packet, decoupling the model from the synthetic illumination prior and enabling in-distribution real-world appearance. Both components train on unpaired open-domain data, and introduce negligible inference overhead. The spatial locality further enables instance-level translation, where individual objects or regions are translated to photorealistic appearance independently while the surrounding scene remains untranslated. On vKITTI $\to$ KITTI image translation, $ψ$-PD outperforms prior methods in realism and semantic consistency while maintaining competitive structural alignment. For CARLA video translation, $ψ$-PD approaches the realism of paired-data methods while reducing VLM planner ADE and FDE by $5.4\%$ and $5.1\%$, respectively.