BEVPose: Unveiling Scene Semantics through Pose-Guided Multi-Modal BEV Alignment

In the field of autonomous driving and mobile robotics, there has been a significant shift in the methods used to create Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations. This shift is characterised by using transformers and learning to fuse measurements from disparate vision sensors, mainly lidar and cameras, into a 2D planar ground-based representation. However, these learning-based methods for creating such maps often rely heavily on extensive annotated data, presenting notable challenges, particularly in diverse or non-urban environments where large-scale datasets are scarce. In this work, we present BEVPose, a framework that integrates BEV representations from camera and lidar data, using sensor pose as a guiding supervisory signal. This method notably reduces the dependence on costly annotated data. By leveraging pose information, we align and fuse multi-modal sensory inputs, facilitating the learning of latent BEV embeddings that capture both geometric and semantic aspects of the environment. Our pretraining approach demonstrates promising performance in BEV map segmentation tasks, outperforming fully-supervised state-of-the-art methods, while necessitating only a minimal amount of annotated data. This development not only confronts the challenge of data efficiency in BEV representation learning but also broadens the potential for such techniques in a variety of domains, including off-road and indoor environments.