Papers for

automotive perception teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Reflection removal improves 3d driving video reconstruction quality

RIDE-Splat: Reflection Removal for In-the-Wild Driving Environments

Abstract: Driving video captured through a windshield violates the world-space consistency assumed by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS): the road scene exhibits parallax while cabin reflections remain attached to the camera, causing standard 3DGS to embed reflected content into the reconstructed scene. We introduce RIDE-Splat, a pipeline for reflection-free 3D reconstruction from posed driving video without clean images, reflection masks, or pretrained networks. RIDE-Splat assigns world-consistent transmission through the windshield to a 3DGS scene and the dominant camera-attached reflection to one shared, signed RGB image. It builds the clean reconstruction in two passes. First, it learns the 3D geometry and the signed reflection image, representing both added radiance and transmission attenuation. Then, it uses the reflection-removed training images to fit a clean 3DGS model. At inference, the reflection image is discarded, preserving the standard 3DGS rendering path. We also introduce the RIDE-Splat Dataset, the first 3D reconstruction benchmark for reflection removal from driving video -- with real driving scenes, physical windshield reflections in training views, and separately captured non-reflective evaluation images. Across the RIDE-Splat Dataset, XLD, and Wayve, RIDE-Splat outperforms 3DGS, DC-Gaussian, and RobustSplat on all nine aggregate metrics, improving PSNR by up to 3.59 dB and reducing LPIPS by up to 0.0876. We achieve the highest metrics in 38 out of 42 per-scene comparisons and removes windshield reflections that remain visible in the baselines while preserving the transmitted scene.

Sun 25 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Driving videos taken through windshields often show unwanted reflections inside the car, which makes it hard to get a clear 3D view of the road. The authors created a method called RIDE-Splat that separates the reflection from the actual scene without needing clean images or special training data. This approach builds a clean 3D model of the outside world by first estimating the reflection and then removing it for a better reconstruction. They also made a dataset to test this method and showed it works better than previous techniques in many driving scenes.
Open → 2610.34632v1

Pedestrian detector boosts accuracy with contour and spectral cues

Contour-Guided Spectral Routing for Robust Real-Time Pedestrian Detection

Abstract: Real-time pedestrian detection in driving scenes is constrained by three coupled failure modes: tiny targets lose discriminative evidence, occlusion weakens geometric support, and weather or illumination changes distort appearance statistics. We formulate the detector through a unified \emph{contour-guided spectral routing} view rather than treating frequency processing, attention, and boundary reasoning as independent add-ons. The detector routes information in a prescribed order: spatial evidence is first augmented with global spectral context, deep representations then exchange spatial and spectral cues, and cross-scale fusion is finally conditioned on boundary--semantic disagreement. This ordering yields a compact representation pipeline in which low-frequency context stabilizes global structure while high-frequency evidence protects small-object contours. We further retain a wavelet-subband training transformation that perturbs low- and high-frequency coefficients independently, targeting appearance shifts caused by fog, rain, snow, and low illumination. The formulation exposes a single routing variable at each stage and distinguishes reusable signal transforms from the task-specific policy that decides where each signal is injected. On CityPersons, the proposed detector obtains 70.4 AP$_{50}$ and 44.2 AP$_{50:95}$, compared with 68.1 and 42.2 for RT-DETR, while the full wavelet-augmented configuration reaches 71.1 and 44.6.

Sun 13 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Detecting pedestrians quickly and reliably in all kinds of weather and lighting is hard, especially when people are far away or partly hidden. The authors propose a new way to process images that carefully mixes boundary shapes, frequency-based information, and attention to focus on important details. Their method treats these parts as one system that first gathers broad context, then combines low- and high-frequency signals, and finally checks disagreements near edges to improve detection. Tested on a standard driving scene dataset, their approach improved accuracy compared to previous real-time methods, especially in challenging conditions like fog or low light.
Open → 2609.14383v1