Reliable scene understanding is indispensable for modern autonomous systems. Current learning-based methods typically try to maximize their performance based on segmentation metrics that only consider the quality of the segmentation. However, for the safe operation of a system in the real world it is crucial to consider the uncertainty in the prediction as well. In this work, we introduce the novel task of uncertainty-aware panoptic segmentation, which aims to predict per-pixel semantic and instance segmentations, together with per-pixel uncertainty estimates. We define two novel metrics to facilitate its quantitative analysis, the uncertaintyaware Panoptic Quality (uPQ) and the panoptic Expected Calibration Error (pECE). We further propose the novel topdown Evidential Panoptic Segmentation Network (EvPSNet) to solve this task. Our architecture employs a simple yet effective probabilistic fusion module that leverages the predicted uncertainties. Additionally, we propose a new Lovász evidential loss function to optimize the IoU for the segmentation utilizing the probabilities provided by deep evidential learning. Furthermore, we provide several strong baselines combining state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation networks with samplingfree uncertainty estimation techniques. Extensive evaluations show that our EvPSNet achieves the new state-of-the-art for the standard Panoptic Quality (PQ), as well as for our uncertaintyaware panoptic metrics.

The availability of a robust map-based localization system is essential for the operation of many autonomously navigating vehicles. Since uncertainty is an inevitable part of perception, it is beneficial for the robustness of the robot to consider it in typical downstream tasks of navigation stacks. In particular localization and mapping methods, which in modern systems often employ convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for perception tasks, require proper uncertainty estimates. In this work, we present uncertainty-aware Panoptic Localization and Mapping (uPLAM), which employs pixel-wise uncertainty estimates for panoptic CNNs as a bridge to fuse modern perception with classical probabilistic localization and mapping approaches. Beyond the perception, we introduce an uncertainty-based map aggregation technique to create accurate panoptic maps, containing surface semantics and landmark instances. Moreover, we provide cell-wise map uncertainties, and present a particle filterbased localization method that employs perception uncertainties. Extensive evaluations show that our proposed incorporation of uncertainties leads to more accurate maps with reliable uncertainty estimates and improved localization accuracy. Additionally, we present the Freiburg Panoptic Driving dataset for evaluating panoptic mapping and localization methods. We make our code and dataset available at: http://uplam.cs.uni-freiburg.de

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