PromptDet: A Lightweight 3D Object Detection Framework with LiDAR Prompts

Multi-camera 3D object detection aims to detect and localize objects in 3D space using multiple cameras, which has attracted more attention due to its cost-effectiveness trade-off. However, these methods often struggle with the lack of accurate depth estimation caused by the natural weakness of the camera in ranging. Recently, multi-modal fusion and knowledge distillation methods for 3D object detection have been proposed to solve this problem, which are time-consuming during the training phase and not friendly to memory cost. In light of this, we propose PromptDet, a lightweight yet effective 3D object detection framework motivated by the success of prompt learning in 2D foundation model. Our proposed framework, PromptDet, comprises two integral components: a general camera-based detection module, exemplified by models like BEVDet and BEVDepth, and a LiDAR-assisted prompter. The LiDAR-assisted prompter leverages the LiDAR points as a complementary signal, enriched with a minimal set of additional trainable parameters. Notably, our framework is flexible due to our prompt-like design, which can not only be used as a lightweight multi-modal fusion method but also as a camera-only method for 3D object detection during the inference phase. Extensive experiments on nuScenes validate the effectiveness of the proposed PromptDet. As a multi-modal detector, PromptDet improves the mAP and NDS by at most 22.8\% and 21.1\% with fewer than 2\% extra parameters compared with the camera-only baseline. Without LiDAR points, PromptDet still achieves an improvement of at most 2.4\% mAP and 4.0\% NDS with almost no impact on camera detection inference time.