No Arabic abstract
3D object detection is vital for many robotics applications. For tasks where a 2D perspective range image exists, we propose to learn a 3D representation directly from this range image view. To this end, we designed a 2D convolutional network architecture that carries the 3D spherical coordinates of each pixel throughout the network. Its layers can consume any arbitrary convolution kernel in place of the default inner product kernel and exploit the underlying local geometry around each pixel. We outline four such kernels: a dense kernel according to the bag-of-words paradigm, and three graph kernels inspired by recent graph neural network advances: the Transformer, the PointNet, and the Edge Convolution. We also explore cross-modality fusion with the camera image, facilitated by operating in the perspective range image view. Our method performs competitively on the Waymo Open Dataset and improves the state-of-the-art AP for pedestrian detection from 69.7% to 75.5%. It is also efficient in that our smallest model, which still outperforms the popular PointPillars in quality, requires 180 times fewer FLOPS and model parameters
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have emerged as a powerful strategy for most object detection tasks on 2D images. However, their power has not been fully realised for detecting 3D objects in point clouds directly without converting them to regular grids. Existing state-of-art 3D object detection methods aim to recognize 3D objects individually without exploiting their relationships during learning or inference. In this paper, we first propose a strategy that associates the predictions of direction vectors and pseudo geometric centers together leading to a win-win solution for 3D bounding box candidates regression. Secondly, we propose point attention pooling to extract uniform appearance features for each 3D object proposal, benefiting from the learned direction features, semantic features and spatial coordinates of the object points. Finally, the appearance features are used together with the position features to build 3D object-object relationship graphs for all proposals to model their co-existence. We explore the effect of relation graphs on proposals appearance features enhancement under supervised and unsupervised settings. The proposed relation graph network consists of a 3D object proposal generation module and a 3D relation module, makes it an end-to-end trainable network for detecting 3D object in point clouds. Experiments on challenging benchmarks ( SunRGB-Dand ScanNet datasets ) of 3D point clouds show that our algorithm can perform better than the existing state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we aim at addressing two critical issues in the 3D detection task, including the exploitation of multiple sensors~(namely LiDAR point cloud and camera image), as well as the inconsistency between the localization and classification confidence. To this end, we propose a novel fusion module to enhance the point features with semantic image features in a point-wise manner without any image annotations. Besides, a consistency enforcing loss is employed to explicitly encourage the consistency of both the localization and classification confidence. We design an end-to-end learnable framework named EPNet to integrate these two components. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and SUN-RGBD datasets demonstrate the superiority of EPNet over the state-of-the-art methods. Codes and models are available at: url{https://github.com/happinesslz/EPNet}.
Self-driving cars need to understand 3D scenes efficiently and accurately in order to drive safely. Given the limited hardware resources, existing 3D perception models are not able to recognize small instances (e.g., pedestrians, cyclists) very well due to the low-resolution voxelization and aggressive downsampling. To this end, we propose Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution (SPVConv), a lightweight 3D module that equips the vanilla Sparse Convolution with the high-resolution point-based branch. With negligible overhead, this point-based branch is able to preserve the fine details even from large outdoor scenes. To explore the spectrum of efficient 3D models, we first define a flexible architecture design space based on SPVConv, and we then present 3D Neural Architecture Search (3D-NAS) to search the optimal network architecture over this diverse design space efficiently and effectively. Experimental results validate that the resulting SPVNAS model is fast and accurate: it outperforms the state-of-the-art MinkowskiNet by 3.3%, ranking 1st on the competitive SemanticKITTI leaderboard. It also achieves 8x computation reduction and 3x measured speedup over MinkowskiNet with higher accuracy. Finally, we transfer our method to 3D object detection, and it achieves consistent improvements over the one-stage detection baseline on KITTI.
The detection of 3D objects from LiDAR data is a critical component in most autonomous driving systems. Safe, high speed driving needs larger detection ranges, which are enabled by new LiDARs. These larger detection ranges require more efficient and accurate detection models. Towards this goal, we propose Range Sparse Net (RSN), a simple, efficient, and accurate 3D object detector in order to tackle real time 3D object detection in this extended detection regime. RSN predicts foreground points from range images and applies sparse convolutions on the selected foreground points to detect objects. The lightweight 2D convolutions on dense range images results in significantly fewer selected foreground points, thus enabling the later sparse convolutions in RSN to efficiently operate. Combining features from the range image further enhance detection accuracy. RSN runs at more than 60 frames per second on a 150m x 150m detection region on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) while being more accurate than previously published detectors. As of 11/2020, RSN is ranked first in the WOD leaderboard based on the APH/LEVEL 1 metrics for LiDAR-based pedestrian and vehicle detection, while being several times faster than alternatives.
Reconstructing 3D object from a single image (RGB or depth) is a fundamental problem in visual scene understanding and yet remains challenging due to its ill-posed nature and complexity in real-world scenes. To address those challenges, we adopt a primitive-based representation for 3D object, and propose a two-stage graph network for primitive-based 3D object estimation, which consists of a sequential proposal module and a graph reasoning module. Given a 2D image, our proposal module first generates a sequence of 3D primitives from input image with local feature attention. Then the graph reasoning module performs joint reasoning on a primitive graph to capture the global shape context for each primitive. Such a framework is capable of taking into account rich geometry and semantic constraints during 3D structure recovery, producing 3D objects with more coherent structure even under challenging viewing conditions. We train the entire graph neural network in a stage-wise strategy and evaluate it on three benchmarks: Pix3D, ModelNet and NYU Depth V2. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the previous state of the arts with a considerable margin.