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Idea of 3D Object Detection

  1. FFPA-Net: Efficient Feature Fusion with Projection Awareness for 3D Object Detection(arXiv)

Author : Chaokang Jiang, Guangming Wang, Jinxing Wu, Yanzi Miao, Hesheng Wang

Abstract : Promising complementarity exists between the texture features of color images and the geometric information of LiDAR point clouds. However, there still present many challenges for efficient and robust feature fusion in the field of 3D object detection. In this paper, first, unstructured 3D point clouds are filled in the 2D plane and 3D point cloud features are extracted faster using projection-aware convolution layers. Further, the corresponding indexes between different sensor signals are established in advance in the data preprocessing, which enables faster cross-modal feature fusion. To address LiDAR points and image pixels misalignment problems, two new plug-and-play fusion modules, LiCamFuse and BiLiCamFuse, are proposed. In LiCamFuse, soft query weights with perceiving the Euclidean distance of bimodal features are proposed. In BiLiCamFuse, the fusion module with dual attention is proposed to deeply correlate the geometric and textural features of the scene. The quantitative results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better feature-level fusion. In addition, the proposed network shows a shorter running time compared to existing methods.

2.Viewer-Centred Surface Completion for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in 3D ObjectDetection (arXiv)

Author : Darren Tsai, Julie Stephany Berrio, Mao Shan, Eduardo Nebot, Stewart Worrall

Abstract : Every autonomous driving dataset has a different configuration of sensors, originating from distinct geographic regions and covering various scenarios. As a result, 3D detectors tend to overfit the datasets they are trained on. This causes a drastic decrease in accuracy when the detectors are trained on one dataset and tested on another. We observe that lidar scan pattern differences form a large component of this reduction in performance. We address this in our approach, SEE-VCN, by designing a novel viewer-centred surface completion network (VCN) to complete the surfaces of objects of interest within an unsupervised domain adaptation framework, SEE. With SEE-VCN, we obtain a unified representation of objects across datasets, allowing the network to focus on learning geometry, rather than overfitting on scan patterns. By adopting a domain-invariant representation, SEE-VCN can be classed as a multi-target domain adaptation approach where no annotations or re-training is required to obtain 3D detections for new scan patterns. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach outperforms previous domain adaptation methods in multiple domain adaptation settings. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/darrenjkt/SEE-VCN

3. Multi-modal Streaming 3D Object Detection(arXiv)

Author : Mazen Abdelfattah, Kaiwen Yuan, Z. Jane Wang, Rabab Ward

Abstract : Modern autonomous vehicles rely heavily on mechanical LiDARs for perception. Current perception methods generally require 360° point clouds, collected sequentially as the LiDAR scans the azimuth and acquires consecutive wedge-shaped slices. The acquisition latency of a full scan (~ 100ms) may lead to outdated perception which is detrimental to safe operation. Recent streaming perception works proposed directly processing LiDAR slices and compensating for the narrow field of view (FOV) of a slice by reusing features from preceding slices. These works, however, are all based on a single modality and require past information which may be outdated. Meanwhile, images from high-frequency cameras can support streaming models as they provide a larger FoV compared to a LiDAR slice. However, this difference in FoV complicates sensor fusion. To address this research gap, we propose an innovative camera-LiDAR streaming 3D object detection framework that uses camera images instead of past LiDAR slices to provide an up-to-date, dense, and wide context for streaming perception. The proposed method outperforms prior streaming models on the challenging NuScenes benchmark. It also outperforms powerful full-scan detectors while being much faster. Our method is shown to be robust to missing camera images, narrow LiDAR slices, and small camera-LiDAR miscalibration

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Monodeep Mukherjee

Universe Enthusiast. Writes about Computer Science, AI, Physics, Neuroscience and Technology,Front End and Backend Development