RTS3D: Real-time Stereo 3D Detection from 4D Feature-Consistency Embedding Space for Autonomous Driving

Although the recent image-based 3D object detection methods using Pseudo-LiDAR representation have shown great capabilities, a notable gap in efficiency and accuracy still exist compared with LiDAR-based methods. Besides, over-reliance on the stand-alone depth estimator, requiring a large number of pixel-wise annotations in the training stage and more computation in the inferencing stage, limits the scaling application in the real world. In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate 3D object detection method from stereo images, named RTS3D. Different from the 3D occupancy space in the Pseudo-LiDAR similar methods, we design a novel 4D feature-consistent embedding (FCE) space as the intermediate representation of the 3D scene without depth supervision. The FCE space encodes the object's structural and semantic information by exploring the multi-scale feature consistency warped from stereo pair. Furthermore, a semantic-guided RBF (Radial Basis Function) and a structure-aware attention module are devised to reduce the influence of FCE space noise without instance mask supervision. Experiments on the KITTI benchmark show that RTS3D is the first true real-time system (FPS$>$24) for stereo image 3D detection meanwhile achieves $10\%$ improvement in average precision comparing with the previous state-of-the-art method. The code will be available at https://github.com/Banconxuan/RTS3D