Fully Sparse 3D Occupancy Prediction

Occupancy prediction plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving. Previous methods typically construct dense 3D volumes, neglecting the inherent sparsity of the scene and suffering high computational costs. To bridge the gap, we introduce a novel fully sparse occupancy network, termed SparseOcc. SparseOcc initially reconstructs a sparse 3D representation from visual inputs and subsequently predicts semantic/instance occupancy from the 3D sparse representation by sparse queries. A mask-guided sparse sampling is designed to enable sparse queries to interact with 2D features in a fully sparse manner, thereby circumventing costly dense features or global attention. Additionally, we design a thoughtful ray-based evaluation metric, namely RayIoU, to solve the inconsistency penalty along depths raised in traditional voxel-level mIoU criteria. SparseOcc demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving a RayIoU of 34.0, while maintaining a real-time inference speed of 17.3 FPS, with 7 history frames inputs. By incorporating more preceding frames to 15, SparseOcc continuously improves its performance to 35.1 RayIoU without whistles and bells. Code will be made available.