CG-SSD: Corner Guided Single Stage 3D Object Detection from LiDAR Point Cloud

Detecting accurate 3D bounding boxes of the object from point clouds is a major task in autonomous driving perception. At present, the anchor-based or anchor-free models that use LiDAR point clouds for 3D object detection use the center assigner strategy to infer the 3D bounding boxes. However, in the real-world scene, due to the occlusions and the effective detection range of the LiDAR system, only part of the object surface can be covered by the collected point clouds, and there are no measured 3D points corresponding to the physical object center. Obtaining the object by aggregating the incomplete surface point clouds will bring a loss of accuracy in direction and dimension estimation. To address this problem, we propose a corner-guided anchor-free single-stage 3D object detection model (CG-SSD). Firstly, the point clouds within a single frame are assigned to regular 3D grids. 3D sparse convolution backbone network composed of residual layers and sub-manifold sparse convolutional layers are used to construct bird’s eye view (BEV) features for further deeper feature mining by a lite U-shaped network; Secondly, a novel corner-guided auxiliary module (CGAM) with adaptive corner classification algorithm is proposed to incorporate corner supervision signals into the neural network. CGAM is explicitly designed and trained to estimate locations of partially visible and invisible corners to obtain a more accurate object feature representation, especially for small or partial occluded objects; Finally, the deep features from both the backbone networks and CGAM module are concatenated and fed into the head module to predict the classification and 3D bounding boxes of the objects in the scene. The experiments demonstrate that CG-SSD achieves the state-of-art performance on the ONCE benchmark for supervised 3D object detection using single frame point cloud data, with 62.77% mAP. Additionally, the experiments on ONCE and Waymo Open Dataset show that CGAM can be extended to most anchor-based models which use the BEV feature to detect objects, as a plug-in and bring +1.17%∼+14.23% AP improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/mrqrs/CG-SSD.