Large receptive field strategy and important feature extraction strategy in 3D object detection

The enhancement of 3D object detection is pivotal for precise environmental perception and improved task execution capabilities in autonomous driving. LiDAR point clouds, offering accurate depth information, serve as a crucial information for this purpose. Our study focuses on key challenges in 3D target detection. To tackle the challenge of expanding the receptive field of a 3D convolutional kernel, we introduce the Dynamic Feature Fusion Module (DFFM). This module achieves adaptive expansion of the 3D convolutional kernel's receptive field, balancing the expansion with acceptable computational loads. This innovation reduces operations, expands the receptive field, and allows the model to dynamically adjust to different object requirements. Simultaneously, we identify redundant information in 3D features. Employing the Feature Selection Module (FSM) quantitatively evaluates and eliminates non-important features, achieving the separation of output box fitting and feature extraction. This innovation enables the detector to focus on critical features, resulting in model compression, reduced computational burden, and minimized candidate frame interference. Extensive experiments confirm that both DFFM and FSM not only enhance current benchmarks, particularly in small target detection, but also accelerate network performance. Importantly, these modules exhibit effective complementarity.

A Generalized Multi-Modal Fusion Detection Framework

LiDAR point clouds have become the most common data source in autonomous driving. However, due to the sparsity of point clouds, accurate and reliable detection cannot be achieved in specific scenarios. Because of their complementarity with point clouds, images are getting increasing attention. Although with some success, existing fusion methods either perform hard fusion or do not fuse in a direct manner. In this paper, we propose a generic 3D detection framework called MMFusion, using multi-modal features. The framework aims to achieve accurate fusion between LiDAR and images to improve 3D detection in complex scenes. Our framework consists of two separate streams: the LiDAR stream and the camera stream, which can be compatible with any single-modal feature extraction network. The Voxel Local Perception Module in the LiDAR stream enhances local feature representation, and then the Multi-modal Feature Fusion Module selectively combines feature output from different streams to achieve better fusion. Extensive experiments have shown that our framework not only outperforms existing benchmarks but also improves their detection, especially for detecting cyclists and pedestrians on KITTI benchmarks, with strong robustness and generalization capabilities. Hopefully, our work will stimulate more research into multi-modal fusion for autonomous driving tasks.