Fine-Grained Pillar Feature Encoding Via Spatio-Temporal Virtual Grid for 3D Object Detection

Developing high-performance, real-time architectures for LiDAR-based 3D object detectors is essential for the successful commercialization of autonomous vehicles. Pillar-based methods stand out as a practical choice for onboard deployment due to their computational efficiency. However, despite their efficiency, these methods can sometimes underperform compared to alternative point encoding techniques such as Voxel-encoding or PointNet++. We argue that current pillar-based methods have not sufficiently captured the fine-grained distributions of LiDAR points within each pillar structure. Consequently, there exists considerable room for improvement in pillar feature encoding. In this paper, we introduce a novel pillar encoding architecture referred to as Fine-Grained Pillar Feature Encoding (FG-PFE). FG-PFE utilizes Spatio-Temporal Virtual (STV) grids to capture the distribution of point clouds within each pillar across vertical, temporal, and horizontal dimensions. Through STV grids, points within each pillar are individually encoded using Vertical PFE (V-PFE), Temporal PFE (T-PFE), and Horizontal PFE (H-PFE). These encoded features are then aggregated through an Attentive Pillar Aggregation method. Our experiments conducted on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate that FG-PFE achieves significant performance improvements over baseline models such as PointPillar, CenterPoint-Pillar, and PillarNet, with only a minor increase in computational overhead.

RadarDistill: Boosting Radar-based Object Detection Performance via Knowledge Distillation from LiDAR Features

The inherent noisy and sparse characteristics of radar data pose challenges in finding effective representations for 3D object detection. In this paper, we propose RadarDistill, a novel knowledge distillation (KD) method, which can improve the representation of radar data by leveraging LiDAR data. RadarDistill successfully transfers desirable characteristics of LiDAR features into radar features using three key components: Cross-Modality Alignment (CMA), Activation-based Feature Distillation (AFD), and Proposal-based Feature Distillation (PFD). CMA enhances the density of radar features through multiple layers of dilation operations, effectively addressing the challenges of inefficient knowledge transfer from LiDAR to radar. AFD is designed to transfer knowledge from significant areas of the LiDAR features, specifically those regions where activation intensity exceeds a predetermined threshold. PFD guides the radar network to mimic LiDAR network features in the object proposals for accurately detected results while moderating features for misdetected proposals like false positives. Our comparative analyses conducted on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that RadarDistill achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for radar-only object detection task, recording 20.5% in mAP and 43.7% in NDS. Also, RadarDistill significantly improves the performance of the camera-radar fusion model.

PillarGen: Enhancing Radar Point Cloud Density and Quality via Pillar-based Point Generation Network

In this paper, we present a novel point generation model, referred to as Pillar-based Point Generation Network (PillarGen), which facilitates the transformation of point clouds from one domain into another. PillarGen can produce synthetic point clouds with enhanced density and quality based on the provided input point clouds. The PillarGen model performs the following three steps: 1) pillar encoding, 2) Occupied Pillar Prediction (OPP), and 3) Pillar to Point Generation (PPG). The input point clouds are encoded using a pillar grid structure to generate pillar features. Then, OPP determines the active pillars used for point generation and predicts the center of points and the number of points to be generated for each active pillar. PPG generates the synthetic points for each active pillar based on the information provided by OPP. We evaluate the performance of PillarGen using our proprietary radar dataset, focusing on enhancing the density and quality of short-range radar data using the long-range radar data as supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that PillarGen outperforms traditional point upsampling methods in quantitative and qualitative measures. We also confirm that when PillarGen is incorporated into bird's eye view object detection, a significant improvement in detection accuracy is achieved.

Unified Contrastive Fusion Transformer for Multimodal Human Action Recognition

Various types of sensors have been considered to develop human action recognition (HAR) models. Robust HAR performance can be achieved by fusing multimodal data acquired by different sensors. In this paper, we introduce a new multimodal fusion architecture, referred to as Unified Contrastive Fusion Transformer (UCFFormer) designed to integrate data with diverse distributions to enhance HAR performance. Based on the embedding features extracted from each modality, UCFFormer employs the Unified Transformer to capture the inter-dependency among embeddings in both time and modality domains. We present the Factorized Time-Modality Attention to perform self-attention efficiently for the Unified Transformer. UCFFormer also incorporates contrastive learning to reduce the discrepancy in feature distributions across various modalities, thus generating semantically aligned features for information fusion. Performance evaluation conducted on two popular datasets, UTD-MHAD and NTU RGB+D, demonstrates that UCFFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming competing methods by considerable margins.

RCM-Fusion: Radar-Camera Multi-Level Fusion for 3D Object Detection

While LiDAR sensors have been succesfully applied to 3D object detection, the affordability of radar and camera sensors has led to a growing interest in fusiong radars and cameras for 3D object detection. However, previous radar-camera fusion models have not been able to fully utilize radar information in that initial 3D proposals were generated based on the camera features only and the instance-level fusion is subsequently conducted. In this paper, we propose radar-camera multi-level fusion (RCM-Fusion), which fuses radar and camera modalities at both the feature-level and instance-level to fully utilize radar information. At the feature-level, we propose a Radar Guided BEV Encoder which utilizes radar Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features to transform image features into precise BEV representations and then adaptively combines the radar and camera BEV features. At the instance-level, we propose a Radar Grid Point Refinement module that reduces localization error by considering the characteristics of the radar point clouds. The experiments conducted on the public nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our proposed RCM-Fusion offers 11.8% performance gain in nuScenes detection score (NDS) over the camera-only baseline model and achieves state-of-the-art performaces among radar-camera fusion methods in the nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark. Code will be made publicly available.

CRN: Camera Radar Net for Accurate, Robust, Efficient 3D Perception

Autonomous driving requires an accurate and fast 3D perception system that includes 3D object detection, tracking, and segmentation. Although recent low-cost camera-based approaches have shown promising results, they are susceptible to poor illumination or bad weather conditions and have a large localization error. Hence, fusing camera with low-cost radar, which provides precise long-range measurement and operates reliably in all environments, is promising but has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we propose Camera Radar Net (CRN), a novel camera-radar fusion framework that generates a semantically rich and spatially accurate bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map for various tasks. To overcome the lack of spatial information in an image, we transform perspective view image features to BEV with the help of sparse but accurate radar points. We further aggregate image and radar feature maps in BEV using multi-modal deformable attention designed to tackle the spatial misalignment between inputs. CRN with real-time setting operates at 20 FPS while achieving comparable performance to LiDAR detectors on nuScenes, and even outperforms at a far distance on 100m setting. Moreover, CRN with offline setting yields 62.4% NDS, 57.5% mAP on nuScenes test set and ranks first among all camera and camera-radar 3D object detectors.

MGTANet: Encoding Sequential LiDAR Points Using Long Short-Term Motion-Guided Temporal Attention for 3D Object Detection

Most scanning LiDAR sensors generate a sequence of point clouds in real-time. While conventional 3D object detectors use a set of unordered LiDAR points acquired over a fixed time interval, recent studies have revealed that substantial performance improvement can be achieved by exploiting the spatio-temporal context present in a sequence of LiDAR point sets. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D object detection architecture, which can encode LiDAR point cloud sequences acquired by multiple successive scans. The encoding process of the point cloud sequence is performed on two different time scales. We first design a short-term motion-aware voxel encoding that captures the short-term temporal changes of point clouds driven by the motion of objects in each voxel. We also propose long-term motion-guided bird's eye view (BEV) feature enhancement that adaptively aligns and aggregates the BEV feature maps obtained by the short-term voxel encoding by utilizing the dynamic motion context inferred from the sequence of the feature maps. The experiments conducted on the public nuScenes benchmark demonstrate that the proposed 3D object detector offers significant improvements in performance compared to the baseline methods and that it sets a state-of-the-art performance for certain 3D object detection categories. Code is available at https://github.com/HYjhkoh/MGTANet.git

3D Dual-Fusion: Dual-Domain Dual-Query Camera-LiDAR Fusion for 3D Object Detection

Fusing data from cameras and LiDAR sensors is an essential technique to achieve robust 3D object detection. One key challenge in camera-LiDAR fusion involves mitigating the large domain gap between the two sensors in terms of coordinates and data distribution when fusing their features. In this paper, we propose a novel camera-LiDAR fusion architecture called, 3D Dual-Fusion, which is designed to mitigate the gap between the feature representations of camera and LiDAR data. The proposed method fuses the features of the camera-view and 3D voxel-view domain and models their interactions through deformable attention. We redesign the transformer fusion encoder to aggregate the information from the two domains. Two major changes include 1) dual query-based deformable attention to fuse the dual-domain features interactively and 2) 3D local self-attention to encode the voxel-domain queries prior to dual-query decoding. The results of an experimental evaluation show that the proposed camera-LiDAR fusion architecture achieved competitive performance on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets, with state-of-the-art performances in some 3D object detection benchmarks categories.