Pillar-Based Object Detection for Autonomous Driving

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. We present a simple and flexible object detection framework optimized for autonomous driving. Building on the observation that point clouds in this application are extremely sparse, we propose a practical pillar-based approach to fix the imbalance issue caused...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Y, Fathi, A, Kundu, A, Ross, DA, Pantofaru, C, Funkhouser, T, Solomon, J
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer International Publishing 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137722
Description
Summary:© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. We present a simple and flexible object detection framework optimized for autonomous driving. Building on the observation that point clouds in this application are extremely sparse, we propose a practical pillar-based approach to fix the imbalance issue caused by anchors. In particular, our algorithm incorporates a cylindrical projection into multi-view feature learning, predicts bounding box parameters per pillar rather than per point or per anchor, and includes an aligned pillar-to-point projection module to improve the final prediction. Our anchor-free approach avoids hyperparameter search associated with past methods, simplifying 3D object detection while significantly improving upon state-of-the-art.