# Enabling Efficient Deep Convolutional Neural Network-based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.11231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11231/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [A guide to convolution arithmetic for deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07285/) (2016)
- [SNE-RoadSeg: Incorporating Surface Normal Information into Semantic Segmentation for Accurate Freespace Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11351/) (2020)
- [LIDAR-Camera Fusion for Road Detection Using Fully Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07941/) (2018)
- [Progressive LiDAR Adaptation for Road Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01206/) (2019)
- [A General Pipeline for 3D Detection of Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00387/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [An Analytical Framework to Enhance Autonomous Vehicle Perception for Smart Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13230/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Autonomous driving demands accurate perception and safe decision-making. To achieve this, automated vehicles are now equipped with multiple sensors (e.g., camera, Lidar, etc.), enabling them to exploit complementary environmental context by fusing data from different sensing modalities. With the success of Deep Convolutional Neural Network(DCNN), the fusion between DCNNs has been proved as a promising strategy to achieve satisfactory perception accuracy. However, mainstream existing DCNN fusion schemes conduct fusion by directly element-wisely adding feature maps extracted from different modalities together at various stages, failing to consider whether the features being fused are matched or not. Therefore, we first propose a feature disparity metric to quantitatively measure the degree of feature disparity between the feature maps being fused. We then propose Fusion-filter as a feature-matching techniques to tackle the feature-mismatching issue. We also propose a Layer-sharing technique in the deep layer that can achieve better accuracy with less computational overhead. Together with the help of the feature disparity to be an additional loss, our proposed technologies enable DCNN to learn corresponding feature maps with similar characteristics and complementary visual context from different modalities to achieve better accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed fusion technique can achieve better accuracy on KITTI dataset with less computational resources demand.
