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This report presents our method which wins the nuScenes3D Detection Challenge [17] held in Workshop on Autonomous Driving(WAD, CVPR 2019). Generally, we utilize sparse 3D convolution to extract rich semantic features, which are then fed into a class-balanced multi-head network to perform 3D object detection. To handle the severe class imbalance problem inherent in the autonomous driving scenarios, we design a class-balanced sampling and augmentation strategy to generate a more balanced data distribution. Furthermore, we propose a balanced group-ing head to boost the performance for the categories withsimilar shapes. Based on the Challenge results, our methodoutperforms the PointPillars [14] baseline by a large mar-gin across all metrics, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance on the nuScenes dataset. Code will be released at CBGS.
Monocular 3D detection currently struggles with extremely lower detection rates compared to LiDAR-based methods. The poor accuracy is mainly caused by the absence of accurate location cues due to the ill-posed nature of monocular imagery. LiDAR point clouds, which provide precise spatial measurement, can offer beneficial information for the training of monocular methods. To make use of LiDAR point clouds, prior works project them to form depth map labels, subsequently training a dense depth estimator to extract explicit location features. This indirect and complicated way introduces intermediate products, i.e., depth map predictions, taking much computation costs as well as leading to suboptimal performances. In this paper, we propose LPCG (LiDAR point cloud guided monocular 3D object detection), which is a general framework for guiding the training of monocular 3D detectors with LiDAR point clouds. Specifically, we use LiDAR point clouds to generate pseudo labels, allowing monocular 3D detectors to benefit from easy-collected massive unlabeled data. LPCG works well under both supervised and unsupervised setups. Thanks to a general design, LPCG can be plugged into any monocular 3D detector, significantly boosting the performance. As a result, we take the first place on KITTI monocular 3D/BEV (birds-eye-view) detection benchmark with a considerable margin. The code will be made publicly available soon.
While current 3D object recognition research mostly focuses on the real-time, onboard scenario, there are many offboard use cases of perception that are largely under-explored, such as using machines to automatically generate high-quality 3D labels. Existing 3D object detectors fail to satisfy the high-quality requirement for offboard uses due to the limited input and speed constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel offboard 3D object detection pipeline using point cloud sequence data. Observing that different frames capture complementary views of objects, we design the offboard detector to make use of the temporal points through both multi-frame object detection and novel object-centric refinement models. Evaluated on the Waymo Open Dataset, our pipeline named 3D Auto Labeling shows significant gains compared to the state-of-the-art onboard detectors and our offboard baselines. Its performance is even on par with human labels verified through a human label study. Further experiments demonstrate the application of auto labels for semi-supervised learning and provide extensive analysis to validate various design choices.
Object detection in three-dimensional (3D) space attracts much interest from academia and industry since it is an essential task in AI-driven applications such as robotics, autonomous driving, and augmented reality. As the basic format of 3D data, the point cloud can provide detailed geometric information about the objects in the original 3D space. However, due to 3D datas sparsity and unorderedness, specially designed networks and modules are needed to process this type of data. Attention mechanism has achieved impressive performance in diverse computer vision tasks; however, it is unclear how attention modules would affect the performance of 3D point cloud object detection and what sort of attention modules could fit with the inherent properties of 3D data. This work investigates the role of the attention mechanism in 3D point cloud object detection and provides insights into the potential of different attention modules. To achieve that, we comprehensively investigate classical 2D attentions, novel 3D attentions, including the latest point cloud transformers on SUN RGB-D and ScanNetV2 datasets. Based on the detailed experiments and analysis, we conclude the effects of different attention modules. This paper is expected to serve as a reference source for benefiting attention-embedded 3D point cloud object detection. The code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/ShiQiu0419/attentions_in_3D_detection.
It is laborious to manually label point cloud data for training high-quality 3D object detectors. This work proposes a weakly supervised approach for 3D object detection, only requiring a small set of weakly annotated scenes, associated with a few precisely labeled object instances. This is achieved by a two-stage architecture design. Stage-1 learns to generate cylindrical object proposals under weak supervision, i.e., only the horizontal centers of objects are click-annotated on birds view scenes. Stage-2 learns to refine the cylindrical proposals to get cuboids and confidence scores, using a few well-labeled object instances. Using only 500 weakly annotated scenes and 534 precisely labeled vehicle instances, our method achieves 85-95% the performance of current top-leading, fully supervised detectors (which require 3, 712 exhaustively and precisely annotated scenes with 15, 654 instances). More importantly, with our elaborately designed network architecture, our trained model can be applied as a 3D object annotator, allowing both automatic and active working modes. The annotations generated by our model can be used to train 3D object detectors with over 94% of their original performance (under manually labeled data). Our experiments also show our models potential in boosting performance given more training data. Above designs make our approach highly practical and introduce new opportunities for learning 3D object detection with reduced annotation burden.
LiDAR-based 3D object detection pushes forward an immense influence on autonomous vehicles. Due to the limitation of the intrinsic properties of LiDAR, fewer points are collected at the objects farther away from the sensor. This imbalanced density of point clouds degrades the detection accuracy but is generally neglected by previous works. To address the challenge, we propose a novel two-stage 3D object detection framework, named SIENet. Specifically, we design the Spatial Information Enhancement (SIE) module to predict the spatial shapes of the foreground points within proposals, and extract the structure information to learn the representative features for further box refinement. The predicted spatial shapes are complete and dense point sets, thus the extracted structure information contains more semantic representation. Besides, we design the Hybrid-Paradigm Region Proposal Network (HP-RPN) which includes multiple branches to learn discriminate features and generate accurate proposals for the SIE module. Extensive experiments on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark show that our elaborately designed SIENet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.