According to one embodiment, an apparatus includes an interface to receive sensor data from a plurality of sensors of an autonomous vehicle. The apparatus also includes processing circuitry to apply a sensor abstraction process to the sensor data to produce abstracted scene data, and to use the abstracted scene data in a perception phase of a control process for the autonomous vehicle. The sensor abstraction process may include one or more of: applying a Sensor data response normalization process to the sensor data, applying a warp process to the sensor data, and applying a filtering process to the sensor data.