Octopus: Vehicle-to-Road Collaborative Perception for Autonomous Driving with Closed-Loop Fusion

A reliable autonomous driving system requires a high-precision perception module. Collaborative perception is emerging as a web-scale information-sharing paradigm for autonomous driving, enabling multiple vehicles to collectively achieve a broader perception field than any single vehicle. However, existing approaches necessitate frequent one-to-many communication, which increases network load and leads to information redundancy. This paper presents Octopus, an innovative vehicle-to-road collaboration framework that leverages the computational capabilities of roadside units. Instead of frequent one-to-many communication, vehicles interact only with roadside units, which significantly reduces communication overhead and improves real-time processing efficiency. While this design alleviates communication burdens, vehicles may still struggle to achieve comprehensive situational awareness in highly dynamic environments. To further address this limitation, our framework incorporates global fusion results as prior knowledge, enabling closed-loop fusion to refine vehicle-side perception. Extensive experiments on OPV2V and V2V4Real datasets demonstrate that Octopus excels at collaborative perception, outperforming the state-of-the-art approach up to 11.58% on AP@0.7, 12.74% on R11@0.7 and 5514× reduction in communication volume.