# StreamingFlow: Streaming Occupancy Forecasting with Asynchronous Multi-modal Data Streams via Neural Ordinary Differential Equation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09585 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09585/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10156/) (2022)
- [Lift, Splat, Shoot: Encoding Images From Arbitrary Camera Rigs by Implicitly Unprojecting to 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05711/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [BEVDepth: Acquisition of Reliable Depth for Multi-view 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10092/) (2022)
- [ST-P3: End-to-end Vision-based Autonomous Driving via Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07601/) (2022)
- [BEVDet4D: Exploit Temporal Cues in Multi-camera 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17054/) (2022)
- [FIERY: Future Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View from Surround Monocular Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10490/) (2021)
- [GRU-ODE-Bayes: Continuous modeling of sporadically-observed time series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12374/) (2019)
- [Fast and Furious: Real Time End-to-End 3D Detection, Tracking and Motion Forecasting with a Single Convolutional Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12395/) (2020)
- [Unifying Voxel-based Representation with Transformer for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00630/) (2022)
- [BEVerse: Unified Perception and Prediction in Birds-Eye-View for Vision-Centric Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09743/) (2022)
- [Time Will Tell: New Outlooks and A Baseline for Temporal Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02443/) (2022)
- [Predicting Semantic Map Representations from Images using Pyramid Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13402/) (2020)
- [Cross-view Semantic Segmentation for Sensing Surroundings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03560/) (2019)
- [IntentNet: Learning to Predict Intention from Raw Sensor Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.07907/) (2021)
- [PolarFormer: Multi-camera 3D Object Detection with Polar Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15398/) (2022)
- [Video Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11339/) (2020)
- [Monocular Semantic Occupancy Grid Mapping with Convolutional Variational Encoder-Decoder Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02176/) (2018)
- [Video Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05991/) (2022)
- [Occupancy Flow Fields for Motion Forecasting in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03875/) (2022)
- [FISHING Net: Future Inference of Semantic Heatmaps In Grids](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09917/) (2020)
- [StretchBEV: Stretching Future Instance Prediction Spatially and Temporally](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13641/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Pillar Motion Learning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08683/) (2021)
- [Learning Interpretable End-to-End Vision-Based Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving with Optical Flow Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12861/) (2021)
- [UniFusion: Unified Multi-view Fusion Transformer for Spatial-Temporal Representation in Bird's-Eye-View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08536/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Grid-Centric Traffic Scenario Perception for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01212/) (2023)
- [LEGO-Motion: Learning-Enhanced Grids with Occupancy Instance Modeling for Class-Agnostic Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07367/) (2025)
- [AsyncBEV: Cross-modal Flow Alignment in Asynchronous 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12994/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting the future occupancy states of the surrounding environment is a vital task for autonomous driving. However, current best-performing single-modality methods or multi-modality fusion perception methods are only able to predict uniform snapshots of future occupancy states and require strictly synchronized sensory data for sensor fusion. We propose a novel framework, StreamingFlow, to lift these strong limitations. StreamingFlow is a novel BEV occupancy predictor that ingests asynchronous multi-sensor data streams for fusion and performs streaming forecasting of the future occupancy map at any future timestamps. By integrating neural ordinary differential equations (N-ODE) into recurrent neural networks, StreamingFlow learns derivatives of BEV features over temporal horizons, updates the implicit sensor's BEV features as part of the fusion process, and propagates BEV states to the desired future time point. It shows good zero-shot generalization ability of prediction, reflected in the interpolation of the observed prediction time horizon and the reasonable inference of the unseen farther future period. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, nuScenes and Lyft L5, demonstrate that StreamingFlow significantly outperforms previous vision-based, LiDAR-based methods, and shows superior performance compared to state-of-the-art fusion-based methods.