Voxel-FPN: Multi-scale voxel feature aggregation for 3D object detection from LIDAR point clouds

Abstract

Object detection in point cloud data is one of the key components in computer vision systems, especially for autonomous driving applications. In this work, we present Voxel-Feature Pyramid Network, a novel one-stage 3D object detector that utilizes raw data from LIDAR sensors only. The core framework consists of an encoder network and a corresponding decoder followed by a region proposal network. Encoder extracts and fuses multi-scale voxel information in a bottom-up manner, whereas decoder fuses multiple feature maps from various scales by Feature Pyramid Network in a top-down way. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method has better performance on extracting features from point data and demonstrates its superiority over some baselines on the challenging KITTI-3D benchmark, obtaining good performance on both speed and accuracy in real-world scenarios.