No Arabic abstract
Voxel-based 3D object classification has been frequently studied in recent years. The previous methods often directly convert the classic 2D convolution into a 3D form applied to an object with binary voxel representation. In this paper, we investigate the reason why binary voxel representation is not very suitable for 3D convolution and how to simultaneously improve the performance both in accuracy and speed. We show that by giving each voxel a signed distance value, the accuracy will gain about 30% promotion compared with binary voxel representation using a two-layer fully connected network. We then propose a fast fully connected and convolution hybrid cascade network for voxel-based 3D object classification. This threestage cascade network can divide 3D models into three categories: easy, moderate and hard. Consequently, the mean inference time (0.3ms) can speedup about 5x and 2x compared with the state-of-the-art point cloud and voxel based methods respectively, while achieving the highest accuracy in the latter category of methods (92%). Experiments with ModelNet andMNIST verify the performance of the proposed hybrid cascade network.
Recent advances on 3D object detection heavily rely on how the 3D data are represented, emph{i.e.}, voxel-based or point-based representation. Many existing high performance 3D detectors are point-based because this structure can better retain precise point positions. Nevertheless, point-level features lead to high computation overheads due to unordered storage. In contrast, the voxel-based structure is better suited for feature extraction but often yields lower accuracy because the input data are divided into grids. In this paper, we take a slightly different viewpoint -- we find that precise positioning of raw points is not essential for high performance 3D object detection and that the coarse voxel granularity can also offer sufficient detection accuracy. Bearing this view in mind, we devise a simple but effective voxel-based framework, named Voxel R-CNN. By taking full advantage of voxel features in a two stage approach, our method achieves comparable detection accuracy with state-of-the-art point-based models, but at a fraction of the computation cost. Voxel R-CNN consists of a 3D backbone network, a 2D bird-eye-view (BEV) Region Proposal Network and a detect head. A voxel RoI pooling is devised to extract RoI features directly from voxel features for further refinement. Extensive experiments are conducted on the widely used KITTI Dataset and the more recent Waymo Open Dataset. Our results show that compared to existing voxel-based methods, Voxel R-CNN delivers a higher detection accuracy while maintaining a real-time frame processing rate, emph{i.e}., at a speed of 25 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti GPU. The code is available at url{https://github.com/djiajunustc/Voxel-R-CNN}.
We present Voxel Transformer (VoTr), a novel and effective voxel-based Transformer backbone for 3D object detection from point clouds. Conventional 3D convolutional backbones in voxel-based 3D detectors cannot efficiently capture large context information, which is crucial for object recognition and localization, owing to the limited receptive fields. In this paper, we resolve the problem by introducing a Transformer-based architecture that enables long-range relationships between voxels by self-attention. Given the fact that non-empty voxels are naturally sparse but numerous, directly applying standard Transformer on voxels is non-trivial. To this end, we propose the sparse voxel module and the submanifold voxel module, which can operate on the empty and non-empty voxel positions effectively. To further enlarge the attention range while maintaining comparable computational overhead to the convolutional counterparts, we propose two attention mechanisms for multi-head attention in those two modules: Local Attention and Dilated Attention, and we further propose Fast Voxel Query to accelerate the querying process in multi-head attention. VoTr contains a series of sparse and submanifold voxel modules and can be applied in most voxel-based detectors. Our proposed VoTr shows consistent improvement over the convolutional baselines while maintaining computational efficiency on the KITTI dataset and the Waymo Open dataset.
A unified neural network structure is presented for joint 3D object detection and point cloud segmentation in this paper. We leverage rich supervision from both detection and segmentation labels rather than using just one of them. In addition, an extension based on single-stage object detectors is proposed based on the implicit function widely used in 3D scene and object understanding. The extension branch takes the final feature map from the object detection module as input, and produces an implicit function that generates semantic distribution for each point for its corresponding voxel center. We demonstrated the performance of our structure on nuScenes-lidarseg, a large-scale outdoor dataset. Our solution achieves competitive results against state-of-the-art methods in both 3D object detection and point cloud segmentation with little additional computation load compared with object detection solutions. The capability of efficient weakly supervision semantic segmentation of the proposed method is also validated by experiments.
Using deep learning techniques to process 3D objects has achieved many successes. However, few methods focus on the representation of 3D objects, which could be more effective for specific tasks than traditional representations, such as point clouds, voxels, and multi-view images. In this paper, we propose a Sphere Node Graph (SN-Graph) to represent 3D objects. Specifically, we extract a certain number of internal spheres (as nodes) from the signed distance field (SDF), and then establish connections (as edges) among the sphere nodes to construct a graph, which is seamlessly suitable for 3D analysis using graph neural network (GNN). Experiments conducted on the ModelNet40 dataset show that when there are fewer nodes in the graph or the tested objects are rotated arbitrarily, the classification accuracy of SN-Graph is significantly higher than the state-of-the-art methods.
Point clouds and RGB images are naturally complementary modalities for 3D visual understanding - the former provides sparse but accurate locations of points on objects, while the latter contains dense color and texture information. Despite this potential for close sensor fusion, many methods train two models in isolation and use simple feature concatenation to represent 3D sensor data. This separated training scheme results in potentially sub-optimal performance and prevents 3D tasks from being used to benefit 2D tasks that are often useful on their own. To provide a more integrated approach, we propose a novel Multi-Modality Task Cascade network (MTC-RCNN) that leverages 3D box proposals to improve 2D segmentation predictions, which are then used to further refine the 3D boxes. We show that including a 2D network between two stages of 3D modules significantly improves both 2D and 3D task performance. Moreover, to prevent the 3D module from over-relying on the overfitted 2D predictions, we propose a dual-head 2D segmentation training and inference scheme, allowing the 2nd 3D module to learn to interpret imperfect 2D segmentation predictions. Evaluating our model on the challenging SUN RGB-D dataset, we improve upon state-of-the-art results of both single modality and fusion networks by a large margin ($textbf{+3.8}$
[email protected]). Code will be released $href{https://github.com/Divadi/MTC_RCNN}{text{here.}}$